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

[Michael Jennings]

On Wednesday, 09 March 2005, at 14:32:46 (-0500),
Matthew Miller wrote:

> I took this suggestion, and reversed the sense of the option, so
> it's now "alwaysprompt". Turning that on (the default) enables the
> current behavior; otherwise, it follows the
> ask-when-taking-the-initiative approach.

Excellent.  Definitely a keeper, default or not.  :-)



On Wednesday, 09 March 2005, at 19:44:35 (-0500),
Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:

> I disagree. Yum is one of those applications that may seriously frel
> up your system,

Oh please.  If yum were that likely to screw up your system, no one
would use it.  And the situations which run the risk of screwing up
your system are the same situations where the patched yum STILL
PROMPTS.

> therefore it should act as "rm" under root: confirm every action
> that actually modifies something, unless you use "-f".

"rm" acts like "rm -i" because RedHat, in its infinite wisdom (sic),
decided to modify /root/.bashrc on all its distributions so that rm,
cp, and mv are all aliased to add the -i option.

Fortunately, it's easy for those of us who do not require a babysitter
to reverse this change.

> It's like doing "rm /etc/passwd"

You mean patently stupid?  :-P

> -- 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".

That's your choice.  But realize that you do not speak for everyone
and may, in fact, be the minority.

> 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.

curl is an excellent utility, and its man page is both comprehensive
and thorough.  All man pages should be so excellent.

I still don't understand this belief you all seem to have that "more
options" and "less understandable" are inseparable conditions.  When
was the last time you looked at the man page for tar or ls?  I
guarantee you there are switches and options you've never used or even
heard of, but I challenge you to prove that their presence inhibits
the use of these tools.

> Let's concentrate on things that are important to more than, what
> seems, 2 users out of very many.

I'd love to hear the explanation of the logic by which you conclude
that 2 mailing list members speaking positively about a patch implies
that no one else on the planet is interested in it.  If that's the way
ideas and feature proposals are to be treated here, please let us know
so that we may fill the list with posts of "me too!" and "that's
great!"

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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