Description of problem: Yum has "localinstall" and "localupdate" commands, but no "localdowngrade" command. This means that if one wants to switch between older and newer versions of a package, the update can be done locally with yum, but a local downgrade requires direct use of the rpm command. This means either wasting bandwidth, or using rpm directly. If the new version of the package breaks networking, using rpm is unavoidable. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): yum-3.2.27-18.fc14.noarch
the downgrade command itself should handle this w/o an issue. just run: yum downgrade /path/to/some/file.rpm
Thanks, that's good to know, but why is the syntax different from that for install and update?
It is not different. install and update can both take an option of a .rpm filename just as well as anything else. localinstall/localupdate were added before we merged the functionality into install/update. They've been kept around purely for legacy reasons so we don't break people's scripts. -sv
Ok, that makes sense. The man page is still confusing in that the descriptions of localinstall and localupdate don't mention at all that they currently exist purely for legacy reasons, so people (like me) tend to think we still have to use it for local operations. Reopening and changing the Summary accordingly.
fixed upstream.
*** Bug 618154 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
In this case I recommend to leave those commands in man page (with obsoletion remark), but remove them from --help and from bash completion. So new users won't start using them. (I don't know what the actual change in upstream was, but this would seem reasonable for me.)
This bug is fixed in the latest yum-3.2.27-20.fc14.noarch, but Kamil's bug still isn't, so I suggested in that bug that it be reopened (but it should be quick to fix since it only involves removing "localinstall" from --help).