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

[Panu Matilainen]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:

> 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

Ouch. Prompting when root is NOT a feature of 'rm', it's just the way RH 
sets it up. If you rely on rm prompting to save you from root mistakes .. 
I wish you luck :)

> 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.

Sure, yum has the potential of messing up your system totally, but not 
prompting when the users request has zero side-effects doesn't make it 
unsafer in any way.

>
> 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.

Oh come on. It's not THAT imporant, and I don't even want the command-line 
switch, but a small, change in default behavior to remove a useless 
prompt when what user asked for is exactly what (s)he'd get.

How about you folks who are opposed to it actually go ahead and try it for 
a while on your local systems and see if it makes sense? I'm willing to 
bet you'll "see the light" :) but if not .. well, case closed then.

 	- Panu -