Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools

[Martin Soto]

On Mon, 2009-05-25 at 13:24 +0200, Remco wrote:
...
> Downgrade
> conversion is probably not feasible for any but the most popular
> packages.

I completely agree with your message. Of course, expecting every package
to provide a downgrade converter is unrealistic. On the other hand, how
often do projects upgrade to a new, incompatible format? In the large
majority of cases, you will be able to just downgrade the software and
keep working as if nothing had happened. For those cases where
downgrades really represent possible data loses, providing a warning so
that people know that they'll lose data if they decide to downgrade is
probably enough.

We should not forget that a downgrade option wouldn't be aimed at the
casual Ubuntu user, but at those people wanting to leave in the bleeding
edge in order to test the latest and greatest. These people should be
table to take care of their data and to deal with the temporary breakage
caused by a bad upgrade (as long as that upgrade is reversible with
reasonable effort, that is). For this reason, there's no need to
overengineer the solution. A relatively simple "keep older package
versions in the repository for a longer time and make dpkg/apt more
amenable to downgrades" should do.

Cheers, 

M. S.