Toby Corkindale <toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au> wrote:
Nope, I'm after having multiple versions in the same suite. I only really need, say, at most six versions, so I could create multiple repositories and then set something up so that when a file is replaced, it shuffles the to-be-deleted package over to the next repository in the chain, who will do the same..
The package management problem and the revision control problem are not the same, but there is an overlap of requirements. One of the advances of Subversion over CVS, as I recall, was that updates were atomic. Clearly this would be desirable in a package manager too, as would the ability to create branches, revert changes, etc. Former Red Hat developers built a package manager of this sort, but it never formed the basis of a widely used distribution so far as I know. The only other effort in this direction that I am aware of is the use of BTRFS snapshots to revert rpm upgrades; but I don't think the file system level is the best place for this unless all of the files controlled by the package manager are in a single hierarchy. I suppose that's one of the motivations for the "/usr merge".