Some fedora devel inconsistencies...

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at welho.com
Fri Nov 14 09:04:47 UTC 2003


On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Jef Spaleta wrote:

> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> (and yes apt can get wild - but if I understand well, yum will block
> every single time whereas I know from experience apt is right most of
> the times)
> 
> 
> 90% okay when 10% wrong can eat 330 packages accidently..can not be
> considered sanely better than 100% wrong, where wrong means you've
> stopped anything from happening.
> 
> Its an issue of failure modes...and the risk those failure modes
> represent to the running system...not to the frustration level of the
> user. The most dangerous thing to a running system's health is the
> administrator. Tools that are 10% or 1% of the time going to flip out
> and want to uninstall large chunks of the system because it found an
> error are not being respectful of the fact that the person at the wheel
> might be drunk with power.

Apt does warn you if it wants to remove like 330 packages - you'll get a
prompt like "You are about to do something potentially harmful. To
continue type in the phrase ..."  If at that point there are no bells
ringing in your head .. well, I dunno :) 

However that works much more reliably in Debian where the packages 
themselves carry a priority, eg "this must never be removed" vs "this is 
just a silly optional screensaver, feel free to toss out" whereas on 
rpm-systems it needs to rely on a manually crafted rpmpriorities file, if 
any.

Actually.. (hear a bell ringing.. looking up source...) you can easily
enable yum-like safe-mode on apt as well: just specify
"APT::Get::Remove=false" in apt.conf or as command line option and it'll
stop right there if an operation would remove something.

	- Panu -





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