Comment 13 for bug 54652

> Any proposed solution field would be editable in the same way, so no
> change there.
Not understood.

> But I think you drastically overestimate how much time
> people competent to write solution fields would have to fill such a
> thing in; time spent on such things has to be traded off against time
> spent fixing other bugs, and developers are often working pretty close
> to capacity already.
Remember that I have done it and I can tell that for somebody who knows which packages to install to fix the bug it takes less than 5 min to fill that "field".
On the other hand, you seem to underestimate the time that hundreds or thousands of people may spend to find that information and just find "fixed". I've done that too and it took me days.
Spending 5 min to spare the human kind more than 1000 hours is well spent time.
On the first foot, the uncontested goal of this ticket, filling in workaround information, usually takes much more time than a simple copy&paste of a package ID.
And that's why I don't understand your first remark, why the field would be called workaround and hence not be filled with fix descriptions.

Because of the insistence that bug #1509453 is a duplicate of this one, I have (almost) merged the titles.

>> BTW, the depots should keep previous (superseded) versions of the
>> packages.
> There is no possible way that archive.ubuntu.com (a widely-mirrored
> site) could realistically have space to do this; the instant result
> would be a significant reduction in the number of sites willing to
> mirror Ubuntu.
I don't believe that (especially when I see Google offer gigabytes to millions of accounts).
In any case, a single server containing the old versions, and to be used (or logically appended to mirrors) only when one wants to downgrade would be sufficient.

Think twice and notice that providing old versions is the way to enable some genius to write a "Restore my system to a previous state (date)" à la Windows.

> However, it's possible to download old versions from
> launchpad.net.
Interesting hidden info. Could you be specific and show how to to download, for example, the previous or 3-numbers-old version of Ubuntu Firefox? Or of any package.

>> This is because a correction can introduce other mistakes. I
>> experienced that several times, lately because of the "latest kernel",
>> my system was going mad. But fortunately, one can downgrade a kernel and
>> I was counting on that and it made me most happy. Isn't that the goal?
> Not really, because the logical consequence of what you're asking for,
> at least if proper ethical behaviour is applied, is that every old
> version has to be security-supported. That does not come close to being
> feasible. Managing regressions is a real problem, but this isn't a good
> solution.
?????
An old version is an old version and is, of course, not supported otherwise than by installing an (existing) newer version !!!!!! Returning to an old version lasts for the time the reason to do so remains and has not been fixed (by a fix of the last fix).

The bottom line of all this is that, without some way to downgrade erroneous fixes like Windows users can do, I have to tell the Ubuntu users that I'm trying to help that it's only doable with Windows.