GUI for urpmi.recover

Latest revision as of 16:25, 2 April 2014

Last week we introduced urpmi.recover - a tool able to rollback the state of your system's package base. The new tool is already used actively and we have got a lot of useful feedback and fixed some issues.

One of the main concerns with urpmi.recover is that it is not very convenient to select a date or number of transactions to be reverted using command-line interface. To solve this problem, we quickly implemented a simple GUI for urpmi.recover; to be more precise, we have extended qt4urpm to support the new tool.

Qt4urpm is a small program developed several years ago by members of MandrivaUser.de community to perform two operations with urpmi repositories - file search and orphan detection and removal. To be sure, such a functionality is partially provided by Rpmdrake, but qt4urpm is much more lightweight (it is written in Qt) and faster. Despite its simple interface, it is sometimes is even more functional than Rpmdrake - for example, by means of qt4urpm you can remove only selected orphan packages. And when working with qt4urpm, you will rarely need to perform more than three mouse clicks.

So we have decided that a simple and straighforward GUI for urpmi.recover will perfectly fit in qt4urpm, and it didn't take much time to implement this. Install the freshest version (2.0) of qt4urpm, launch the program and select the urpmi.recover tab. Here you will see a list of transactions sorted by date. For every transaction, a set of packages is displayed which were installed during it:

Now select any transaction and press Rollback - urpmi.recover will revert all transactions starting from the selected one. That's all, folks:)

Maybe in future our GUI experts will implement something more beautiful, but from functionality point of view, qt4urpm already provides all the information you need to play with you package base state. We hope that it will help you to avoid getting lost in rpm transactions and to feel more comfortable when rolling back your system to some date in the past.