Reverting back in time (like using a time capsule)

martin.demare
Thu, 02 Sep 2021 08:32:56 +0000
General Usage

Hi,
While i was trouble-shooting a precompile error I tried figuring out which packages might work well together by looking at the release date on Git, however pinning package after package manually based on the Git-date didn’t feel very efficient.

What I was really after was something like
Pkg.instantiate("<2021-06-30")
i.e pretending that I did the instantiate back in June, in this case.

Such functionality would add to the overall robustness of Julia by helping e.g. when released packages break dependencies in non-trivial ways (and not everyone have all their manifests-files backed up appropriately). It might also be used as a trouble-shooting tool to figure out which package(s) are causing problems.

For this functionality to be implemented, probably a release date would have to added to each package (unless all packages are under version control and the package manager can access the timestamp).

An alternative solution would be to maintain public repositories of daily/weekly manifest files for every supported release (or something similar). If so, these manifest files would have to include more or less every available package, which, I guess, might lead to some dependency issues as well.

Martin

PS. I am quite new to Julia, so apologies if I got things very wrong!

1 post - 1 participant