Thank you, I was not aware of the option to change the default vendor-change behavior in the zypper’s config file. In any case, even if otherwise the zypper config change you mentioned works, adding swannema’s OBS repo and changing the default vendor-change behavior in zypp.conf unlikely to have worked in this case due to the lower version numbers, at least by zypper. That OBS repo only had 5-6 files of which only 4 were relevant and only 2 were actually installed on my machine. Adding the repo, changing/locking vendor and possibly changing priority seemed overkill for trying out two packages :). And, as I said zypper saw the packages from the OBS repo as having lower version number than the originals. BTW, I tried ‘rpm -iv --replacepkgs ’ first that supposed to work with higher or at least same version number packages, it did not. The list of rpm complaints exceeded the capacity of my terminal’s display buffer. That’s why I used ‘rpm --force…’ and removed the originals only after I had no problems with the forced packages.
With my alternative, - it’s a shot in the dark -, with wendor stickiness disabled zypper should not have downgraded the 199 packages in addition to the 100 ones it upgraded. This is, if the disabling of vendor-stickiness only affects higher version numbered packages. Again I don’t know if it had caused any problems. In addition the article you linked to, only talks about updates (ie., ‘zypper up’ ) that is not really used with tumbleweed. Have you ever checked if it works with distribution upgrade (ie., ‘zypper dup’)?
Apologies for the weird formatting problems in some of my my posts. I haven’t quite figured out the markup used. Its really bad when I copy/paste :).