[Yum-devel] requested 'protectbase', as used in yum 2.0

[Michael Jennings]

On Sunday, 06 March 2005, at 21:52:21 (-0500),
seth vidal wrote:

> no they're not, not at all. 

Sure they are.  You're just not looking at them that way.  But like I
said, I'm already using them as exactly that, and I guarantee you I'm
not the only one.

> if I remove something from a room I'm not 'scoring it lower', I'm
> taking it completely out.

Yup.  And as my example demonstrated, the exact same concept applies
to priorities.  You REMOVE (not score lower) any package in repo X
which exists in a higher-priority repo.

> That's my point - instead of a vercmp being:
> e:v-r
> 
> this would make it:
> repo-e:v-r

Nothing of the sort.  If you can do protectbase, you can do
priorities.  The algorithm for the latter is simply multiple passes of
the algorithm for the former.

> you're talking about changing scoring so that if you compare the
> depsolving function to how rpm does it you'll get something VERY
> different.

I said nothing of the kind.  Did you read my example?  I'm talking
about removing packages from repositories, just like exclude or
protectbase would.  The only difference is that instead of doing:

exclude=foo

I'm saying

exclude=everything that's already in a higher-priority repo

> User's have a hard enough time understanding epoch, let alone adding
> a repository epoch.

Which is exactly why I'm not suggesting that. :-)

> Cmon, you should know by now that giving users too many knobs to
> frob just makes them do bizarre and questionable things.  Why do you
> think we don't have --nodeps and --force in yum?

Well, since you mentioned it, you and I disagree on that point as
well.  I have run into a few situations where that being possible
would've saved me quite a bit of time.  But then, we disagree on that
point of fundamental philosophy:  you want to restrict users' ability
to set themselves on fire.  I, on the other hand, prefer to hand them
the lighter fluid and the matches and say, "Aim wisely."  :-)

Michael

-- 
Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX)  http://www.kainx.org/  <mej at kainx.org>
n + 1, Inc., http://www.nplus1.net/       Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org)
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