Conflicts policy (Was: Re: Goodbye, Fedora)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:02:49 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:

> > Seems nobody is targeting anymore to make "full installations" possible.
> > 
> 
> Is it even theoretically possible?

If the allocated disk space is large enough and all packages can be
installed without conflicts, it boils down to whether all packages can
coexist, for example whether they use the alternatives system to replace
eachother or whether they fight for resources.

Imagine somebody, who tries to install all -devel packages, because
compiling software from tarballs needs many of them. All sorts of
conflicts that request user input are like poison.

But even without full installs, imagine somebody installs Fedora 7 and
adds a customised selection of packages later. After updating the
installation regularly without problems, suddenly an update leads to a
needed chain of dependencies, which is rejected due to conflicts, because
either a) there are a packaging bug, or b) there are explicit "Conflicts:"
in the packages. Hence it is important that all conflicts inside %dist
package set are examined closely.