[Yum-devel] "doastold" option, or, putting code where my mouth is

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Wed, 2005-09-03 at 18:53 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> It's not (entirely) about annoyance. The larger problem I see is repetition
> of prompting. This is an important usability principle -- prompt for
> surprising or distructive behavior, and don't prompt when you're just going
> to do as told.

I disagree. Yum is one of those applications that may seriously frel up
your system, therefore it should act as "rm" under root: confirm every
action that actually modifies something, unless you use "-f". It's like
doing "rm /etc/passwd" -- it matches only one file, but I'd rather have
it ask me about it than go "oh, well, that's what he asked after all, so
that's got to be okay". Same with yum, especially seeing as ctrl-c
doesn't work quite as reliably in it due to RPM signal trapping, so
going "ohcrapohcrapohcrap!" is going to be far more challenging in the
absence of a way to stop the process.

Honestly, I think of all areas where yum can be improved, this is among
the last, and just adds another obscure command-line switch, making yum
less grokable. Check out "man curl" some time to see what I mean.

Let's concentrate on things that are important to more than, what seems,
2 users out of very many. If this feature is so important to you, then
maybe you should write a "poweryum" wrapper to yum libs.

Regards,
-- 
Konstantin Ryabitsev <icon at linux.duke.edu>
Duke University Physics