smart wants to downgrade gcc, why?

[seth vidal]

On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 17:06 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 10:37 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > > If this is true, the issue even is independent of smart.
> > > 
> > > [FWIW: I repeatedly had seen similar issues happening with yum.]
> > 
> > you've seen yum try to downgrade a package?
> No.
> 
> > Wow, i'd love to see that. could you show me a screenshot of that
> > happening?
> There seems to be a misunderstanding. What I have seen happening is yum
> behaving differently in consecutive yum run.
> 
> E.g. I've seen the following:
> # yum check-update
> [reports a couple of packages to update]
> 
> # yum update
> [doesn't upgrade]
> 
> My explanations is that yum was choosing different mirrors in these
> runs, where it happens to hit mirrors in different states.
> 
> 
> When the libtool issue occurred, a couple of days ago, this produced
> funny effects: 
> 
> Consecutive "yum update" runs either bombed out with "broken
> repository", upgraded a couple of packages, or had found nothing to
> upgrade.
> 
> My explanation: Different mirrors where in different states of sync.
> Depending in which shape the currently chosen mirror and the current
> state of the system was, yum updated some older packages, found the
> libtool<->gcc conflict, etc.
> 

which is not, AT ALL, the same as giving the user a process to continue
to that will put their system in a questionably functional state. How
many users do you know that will just type 'yes' at every prompt? I know
a lot of them. That's a good reason, alone, to not allow
downgrade/removal paths that the user did not explicitly select.

-sv