[arch-general] Multiple Kernels

[Heiko Baums]

Am Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:08:23 +0100
schrieb Attila <vodoo0904 at sonnenkinder.org>:

> One of them which is important be the kernel. So if pacman would have
> the option to install a certain version of a package than the user
> need only to know if there is more than one version in db. So perhaps
> this coould be solved at example for a search of all by a "pacman -Ss
> --allversions ^kernel". Last not least repo-add and repo-remove must
> have the possibilty to do this too.
> 
> Than the devs could decide for what for packages they think it is
> worth to have an downgrade option and it doesn't matter what is in
> the cache of everyone.
> 
> I think all other ways makes too much work for seldom cases but this
> is only my view and not a feature request. On the other side i think
> it is even worth to have an own kernel package and the PKGBUILD of
> kernel26 makes it very easy to do this.

It's contrary because these cases are so seldom it would make too much
work to keep and maintain several older versions and it would cost much
more disk space and traffic on the mirrors.

See Gentoo with its USE flags, slots, multiple versions in the portage
tree etc. All these features are quite nice and supposedly flexible.
But in fact I like the feeling of having lost all this ballast on Arch.

On Gentoo you need to have several versions of several packages
installed (the slots) because of keeping all these older versions and
because of the version based dependencies.

And the two cases in which I needed the previous version I was lucky
with the pacman -U option.

Greetings,
Heiko