Downgrade somehow bricked my entire system
Theslees opened this issue Β· comments
π Bug Report
Checklist
- [N] No duplicate issues/PRs
- [Y] Are you running the latest
downgrade
release from the AUR?
Environment
- System information:
System is unusable so I dont know how to execute that command
- Downgrade version:
downgrade version was 11.2 I believe
Description
Trying to downgrade gcc and gcc-libs caused the entiee system to be unresponsive after it finished, and upon force shutting it down and rebooting it, plasma became unbootable and would just kick me back into my login manager when trying to login.
Steps to Reproduce
- Install downgrade via yay
- run
downgrade gcc gcc-libs
and choose 11.2.0 for both - System becomes unresponsive and only way to showdown is by forcing it, causing your DE oe any session to be unbootable
Expected behavior
gcc and gcc-libs to downgrade from 12.1.0 to 11.2.0
Actual behavior
I don't even know, it just broke everything and I don't understand how
Command trace
I don't know how to access the system so I think I might have to make a ubuntu recovery stick and see what I can do, but I don't even know what the command did.
Uninstalling downgrade and reverting the changes it did in tty fixed it, now it's back to normal
If there's a log I can post please let me know because there isnt any log downgrade produced that I know of.
Uninstalling downgrade and reverting the changes it did in tty fixed it, now it's back to normal
Okay, could you now share your system information and downgrade version (see commands in the PR template)?
If there's a log I can post please let me know
Downgrade does not have a dedicated log. But since the installation procedure is done via pacman
, you could post a snippet of the relevant lines in /var/log/pacman.log
.
Expected behavior
gcc and gcc-libs to downgrade from 12.1.0 to 11.2.0
I tried downgrading both gcc
and gcc-libs
as documented in both a VM and my local machine. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I did not encounter any such issues of "bricking". But then again I don't use KDE Plasma, so maybe that plays a part.
Actual behavior
I don't even know, it just broke everything and I don't understand how
Going forward, there are two causes to consider:
- Was there an error within the execution of
downgrade
which caused the issue (eg. was there a bug indowngrade
itself which altered the system in an unexpected way)? - Or did
downgrade
execute successfully and the issue was caused because of some dependency-related error in the system itself (eg. KDE Plasma uses a library which implicitly depends on a particular version ofgcc-libs
and this was not documented as an explicit dependency in thePKGBUILD
of the relevant package(s))?
As a maintainer of downgrade
, my main concern is to ensure that downgrade
did what it was expected/told to do i.e. downgrade packages. Based on my experiments, I can verify that downgrade
indeed downgraded gcc
and gcc-libs
successfully. So from that perspective, I don't see an issue here for downgrade
.
That being said, I am not saying that your issue is not valid; I just think (based on the evidence here) that the issue is not related to downgrade
and more relevant to another package which implicitly depends on one or more of the downgraded packages.
As a final note, I would err on the side of caution when using downgrade
to downgrade low-level packages such as gcc
and gcc-libs
; precisely because of the reasons mentioned above on implicit dependencies. If you really need to perform this downgrade, maybe it could make sense to look into A.L.A snapshots:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux_Archive#How_to_restore_all_packages_to_a_specific_date
@pbrisbin WDYT?
Sorry to hear about this, it must've been frustrating!
As @atreyasha mentioned, downgrade doesn't actually handle the aspects of this that bricked your system (likely changing some hard-linked shared library not captured by package version constraints). downgrade
just helps searching for and selecting older packages from the archive, and then installs things via pacman
:
sudo pacman -U \
https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/g/gcc/gcc-11.2.0-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst \
https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/g/gcc-libs/gcc-libs-11.2.0-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
You could easily run this command yourself and find the same outcome. So it's not that downgrade
bricked you, it's that installing older versions of gcc
doesn't work on your system.
Installing software outside of official sources will always come with increased risk, particularly older versions of core libraries.