Rawhide stability

[Panu Matilainen]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Roland McGrath wrote:

>> Primarily, I have to update manually and often have to exclude some broken
>> deps.
>
> This would be greatly aided if yum had a "smallest usable transaction"
> mode.  That is, instead of always doing one giant upgrade that barfs if
> there are dependency problems, it would take each update available and suck
> in only its necessary deps as if you'd done "yum upgrade foobar" on the
> individual package, finish that, and then do the next transaction.  When
> some packages have dependency problems, they get punted but not everything
> else unrelated.  So instead of either "wait for a day when yum upgrade works"
> or "mess around manually a lot", every day has an "easily upgrade what
> upgrades easily" option.

For all the bizarre decisions apt-rpm can occasionally do in depsolving, 
this kind of thing it does rather well. Depending on various details and 
the used method, it'll either hold back from updating a package or remove 
if there's no other way to solve the issue. Additionally with 
--fix-missing it's much more forgiving about partially out-of-sync mirrors 
than yum is.

I have a feeling I've said this before but I find it somewhat funny that 
yum refuses to work with broken repository but doesn't care about 
broken dependencies on the installed system whereas apt refuses to work 
with broken dependencies on the installed system, yet is fairly forgiving 
about badness in repository. Usually using one or the other will get you 
around the problem, depending on the situation :)

 	- Panu -