my take on the protected packages problem

[Ales Kozumplik]

Hello,

I'll miss the #yum meeting today but in case this topic comes up, I'd 
like to state where I stand:

First of all, I feel like I might be starting to get biased here, but no 
less so then the whole fedora-devel thread. What I'd like to suggest is 
wait for this to calm down and then wait for people coming back still 
(random users, not the fedora devel crowd) complaining we broke their 
use case. And then trying to see how to consistently provide solutions 
for that. Re-adding protected packages is one option, perhaps with 
better specified semantics then there is in yum.conf [1] (I dislike the 
"Also if this configuration is set to anything, then yum will protect 
the package corresponding to the running version of the kernel.")

But we should remember that there will have to be a default setting of 
that config value---is kernel going to be in it or not? We shouldn't 
forget that there are people who welcomed the change. And also: if one 
does 'dnf erase kernel', there is still the transaction confirmation 
prompt asking him if he really wants to remove these 5 kernels. Perhaps 
all we need is highlighting the running kernel in the overview somehow.

Another thing is the '--all' switch that would force over the protected 
packages. I kind of liked it first. But we already have the '-y' switch 
that says 'yeah, really, whatever'. We know there is a large semantic 
difference between the two, but will the users who spent 3 minutes *at 
best* reading the man page know? Or will they be confused? I generally 
try to reduce the number of config options and CLI switches, not add them.

But as I said, I'd prefer this topic to cool off for a while, see how 
things evolve.

Ales

[1] http://linux.die.net/man/5/yum.conf