I’m happy to announce that apt-checkpoint 0.1 has been released..

I’m excited about this, partially because this is the first “open source” project that I’ve gotten to a releasable state but also because it’s just a damn handy utility. I pimped the project in #debian-devel (on irc.freenode.net) today. A few people said things like “that’d be useful for me” and “this is a good idea, i’ll try it out in a chroot later. actually it will be really useful for chroots when you want to revert changes.”, while another sputtered “packages are not required to support downgrading at all” and “while [ 1] ; do dpkg –get-selections | awk ‘{print $1}’ | grep -v apt | xargs dpkg –purge; done.” and “Use a file system with snapshots.”

Of course, there are various ways of manually downgrading packages. The problem with his suggestion is that, while technically feasible, is not a clean solution. I shouldn’t have to pipe commands back and forth to accomplish what should be a seamless, automated task. Linux isn’t just the playground the technologically elite. Linux needs to be user-friendly, while still allowing us technophiles to get our hands dirty. apt-checkpoint, while rough and cludgy, is just an example of the kind of usability people need. They should be able to upgrade and, if something breaks, seamlessly rollback, akin to restore points in Windows (which are used for the exact same reason).

A few people have already started to play with apt-checkpoint. Hopefully I’ll get some good feedback from them, and a stable 0.2 release will be ready in the near future.