A record number of breakages?

Rodd Clarkson rodd at clarkson.id.au
Thu Aug 18 10:11:33 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 15:44 -0400, Horst von Brand wrote:
> Mark McLoughlin <markmc at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 21:43 +0100, Paul wrote:
> > > I'm not sure if it's me or the build box, but today must go down as the
> > > day with most number of packages borked in rawhide - there are tonnes
> > > relying on libpixman and libcairo and if they're excluded, there are
> > > still about that additionally have to be excluded as well!
> > 
> > 	Here's a thought - if the daily rawhide report comes with a list of
> > broken dependencies, it probably wouldn't take much for it to also
> > include the yum command line needed to update everything not affected by
> > the broken deps. Or yum itself could have a --exclude-broken-deps ...
> 
> I'd vote for --shadow=SomePackageGlob, meaning "Install everything that
> doesn't depend (directly or indirectly) on SomePackage" (modulated by the
> usual --exclude=SomeJunk and ListOfStuff arguments). Methinks this would be
> generally useful, not only for futzing around with rawhide, as this is
> usually what you want (not just raw --exclude=ThisOrThat).
> 
> Or else, "--install-whatever-you-can --i-know-what-im-doing
> --yes-i-do-mean-it --just-doit-damnit" flags
> 
> > 	Broken deps are always going to be a fact of life with rawhide - it'd
> > be nice if didn't suck up too much time for people, though.

Why make this so confusing?

Why not just have yum run as it usually does.  If all is good the all is
good.  If there are broken dependencies, then yum could report that not
all the updates could be installed and supply a list of updates that can
be installed and updates that can't be (and why - presumably broken
dependencies).  For here, yum would ask you would you like to install
those updates that can be install and then assuming you do install them.

This would be a much saner default IMHO.  For starters, it would mean
that in situations where yum has a list of 30 or 40 updates (and
presumably security updates amongst them) and there's a problem with
just a single package, you still get most of the goodness (including
security updates).

There's not really any need to special flags since this seems like a
pretty sane way for yum to run.  As long as it reports what wasn't
installed so that people know that some packages haven't been installed
(and why) then this would solve a lot of traffic on the list and make
installing what packages that can be install much easier.


Rodd 
-- 
"It's a fine line between denial and faith.
 It's much better on my side"




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