Not planned Roll back to the last working configuration

[Fred.]

I think everyone would like this.

It would be nice if we could go back to the last working configuration of an add-on. Or even XenForo (But that's probably more complicated)
I recently had a few problems with add-on's and was unable to go back to the old add-on because the new add-on changed so many things.

If XF could register what it changed or backup the changes it could undo them.
I think it's perfectly possible, the only thing might be the impact on the DB/Filesystem size.
But who cares about a few GB's these days. Of course with a big board it might be tricky if the tables of that add-on are huge.

Please like if you agree

b.t.w. I always make backups before I update something, and test on my dev forum. Just want to say that before you guys start about it.

 

[Daniel Hood]

I could see this being possible in v2 if they change the way add-ons install. If they made something comparable to the datawriters of v1 where we list our tables and columns and they do all the schema changes, reverting could be realistic. Currently it's next to impossible because we execute our queries on our own. That's also why people end up with orphaned data after uninstalls, etc...

 

[Fred.]

Thanks for the explanation Daniel
I don't expect this soon... It would be nice for the future.

 

[Mike]

While a nice idea, it's not really feasible in the generic case. Sure, we could drop tables or remove new columns, those aren't the only changes that can be made in an upgrade. Data can be arbitrarily rewritten. You'll see plenty of examples of this in upgrades. For example, changes to the storage structure of censors and IPs. This also would have to be able to revert all of the old data, which isn't really available.

In theory, downgrade systems could be written, but I would suggest that add-ons might be the most pressing reason for this and they may be more unlikely (on the whole) to write--and test--arbitrary downgrades.