What about smartpm?

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 12:12 -0800, Tim Fenn wrote:
> > It's because this is a safer behaviour than guessing around various
> > errors. You think it's wonderful, but it's far more error-prone than not
> > doing anything "automagically" until the problem is actually fixed.
> > Working around brokenness is a very slippery path to far graver and more
> > obscure brokenness down the line.
> > 
> 
> Perhaps it was a bad example (I don't think smart will break deps to
> perform an upgrade, but I could be wrong).  Some interesting cases
> (where indeed both yum and apt fail):
> 
> http://zorked.net/smart/doc/README.html#study-cases

Yeah, and this is still unsafe, because downgrading is inherently,
implicitly unsafe.

1. You can downgrade into a vulnerability
2. Downgrading often breaks, since newer version can do things in %post
that make downgrading to a workable state impossible

It's a fine feature, sure, but it's important that people understand --
yum doesn't offer this not because the developers are lazy, but because
safety and consistency is the prime directive as far as yum's feature
roadmap is concerned.

Regards,
-- 
Konstantin Ryabitsev
McGill University WSG
Montréal, Québec