On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 09:02:15AM +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> Meanwhile, new packaging for, say, nautilus which has
> Requires(missingok): gnome-vfs2-smb
> and a depsolver that tests RPMSENSE_MISSINGOK drop a sub-tree that
> is optional.
>
> I fail to see a mulberry bush, except in this loopy and endless fretting.
>
> Show me the mulberries *please*.
user goes from package-1.0-1.0 to package-1.1-1.0 which now had a
Requires(missingok): gnome-vfs2-smp. Fine; yum (for the sake of
argument) grabs gnome-vfs2-smp as well and everything is happy.
Now the user gets annoyed by the "bloat" and removes gnome-vfs2-smp.
Still fine.
Then a security update comes out, package-1.1-1.1 and the user of course
upgrades to that. yum will *AGAIN* pull in gnome-vfs2-smp. User gets
really annoyed and considers this not-fine.
As the current answer to "Can I do a yum upgrade of my system?" is
"Read the Release Notes to see what special magic anaconda knows about and
then do the upgrade at your own risk" I think yum/apt/etc shouldn't default
to adding a missingok package when upgrading. This should only be something
that anaconda does. Of course, I don't code for any of the package managers
so it's not up to me.
-Toshio