smart package mgr question?

[Axel Thimm]

On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 01:14:35AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Gene Heskett wrote:
> >I just ran smart pkg mgr on my FC5 lappy, and any cups I click on claims 
> >it will downgrade 3 packages if I exec it.  What the heck?  Yumex doesn't 
> >seem to have that problem.

Are you perhaps clicking on old packages? If you have foo-1.2.3 and
foo-devel-1.2.3 installed and you click on foo-devel-1.0.0 it will try
to downgrade at least two packages, since you asked smart to do so
more or less explicitly.

> Smart uses a different dependency resolving algorithm that offers to 
> downgrade packages automatically. RPM is not designed for downgrades

One of the core features of rpm from the very beginning was to
downgrades and uninstalls so the user is able to revert from a bad
package. So rpm does indeed support downgrades by design. It does have
a safety pin installed in that you need to use --oldpackage so novice
users don't accidentially downgrade stuff while thinking they are
upgrading it.

The downgrading offer should be investigated. Since the repo is not
counting on package managers downgrading stuff, but a depsolver still
believes this is neccessary, either the depsolver made a bogus
calculation, or there is an issue in the repo. Both are worthwhile to
understand and fix, so the plea to the original poster to explicitely
post the output of smart.

> and Yum, Yumex, Pirut etc dont support this. Whether this is a
> advantage or not is debatable.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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