smart package mgr question?

[Axel Thimm]

On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 03:25:30PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> >True, but ... the classical situation when apt/smart try to downgrade is
> >resolving broken package deps inside of an installed system.
> >apt and smart diagnose them and try to resolve them (by downgrading),
> >yum doesn't diagnose these problems and lets users believe "everything
> >is OK", while it actually isn't.
> >
> >I.e. the fact yum doesn't complain, doesn't mean it is right.
> >
> 
> I have run into problems where apt tries to fix the repository issues 
> and fails and doesnt let me perform other operations like updating a 
> package which is completely unrelated to repo breakages.

That's true, apt always checks the global health of your system and
bails out if it detects something broken to alert the user. That is a
debatable policy (there is no technical reason to do so) mostly
because it doesn't allow you to use apt anymore to fix the breakage.

smart goes a golden middle way. You can ask smart to do a global check
and also to fix everything that is broken, but the usual checks
performed by upgrade/install operation do are context-local, e.g. only
the packages and package relations directly affected by the current
operation are checked (and fixed). This includes both broken
dependencies in the system already as well as broken repos (e.g. half
mirrored repos).

I think smart offers the best of both worlds, local checking and
local fixing of broken dependencies and *optional* global checking &
dependency fixing.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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