rawhide report: 20060624 changes

[Erwin Rol]

On Sun, 2006-06-25 at 19:26 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-06-25 at 15:44 +0200, Leszek Matok wrote:
> > Dnia 25-06-2006, nie o godzinie 18:53 +0530, Rahul Sundaram napisał(a):
> > > rpm is a low level tool
> > > Its generally a good design not to expose all of
> > > the functionality in higher level tools
> > True, but yum is a dep-resolver and rpm-downloader. I expect it to allow
> > me to specify version of a package I want to have (either upgrade to
> > newer, but not newest, or downgrade to older), then check if it can
> > satisfy all the dependencies with that version. I don't want it to have
> > --nodeps nor real --force, only something like rpm --oldpackage and rpm
> > -F package-version.rpm (now it's equivalent to say rpm -F package-*.rpm
> > and selects the newest).
> > 
> > If the dependencies can be satisfied and I want to test some package
> > version (because I want to see which version introduced a bug I'm
> > reporting on bugzilla, helping you fix it), there's no reason not to let
> > me do it. It's far from rpm -e --nodeps glibc, you know :)
> > 
> > Telling users on the list to use rpm --force --nodeps --whatever instead
> > of yum install package-older-version is teaching them bad things and is
> > more harmful.
> 
> Have you actually requested this functionality anywhere? We are talking
> about two different things here. For this particular problem, simply
> removing the older version of nfs-utils helps resolve it. It doesnt
> require any rpm command command at all, not to mention, no use of
> arguments like --nodeps and --force and that isnt being advocated by any
> developers. 

For nfs-utils it might work, but other packages might not be as easy to
just "remove" and "install" again, because they might break things, for
example bash, glibc, rpm, etc. A good way to install a specific version
of a package might be way better than a --nodeps or --force in yum or
rpm. 

Would it technical (and political ;-) possible to extent yum (maybe even
via an optional plugin) so that it could install a package with version
X. If version X causes dependency problems because an already installed
packages needs version > X than it could just bail out. That way one
could more easily fix problems like with nfs-utils, but it will not
allow the user to shoot itself in the foot by doing a rpm -e --nodeps
glibc :-)

- Erwin