[Yum] other stuff

[Konstantin Riabitsev]

On Thu, 2002-06-27 at 11:25, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> > "Y/n". You answer "y", after which it...
> 
> proceeds to install everything it DOES know how to install and then
> 
> >    ...drops you into shell and lets you
> > fix things using wget and rpm? :)

Eww, that would be analogous to passing a "--force" to rpm, which is a
big, nasty, hairy hack, unless we are talking about different things. I
don't see a way to successfully resolve dependency problems this way.
Fixing a broken rpmdb is not pretty work.

Overall yum is effectively an interface which allows us to find the
dependencies and pass a bunch of packages to "rpm -Uvh" -- it simply
makes sure that all packages passed to rpm for upgrade/install have
their dependencies resolved. If they weren't, rpm would bail saying "I
need blah to install foo". Forcing things to install is not a good
solution at all in my opinion.

> Run interactively, there are lots of places where one could add helper
> interactive sequences designed to encapsulate solutions to some simple,
> common problems and to guide novices towards a better understanding of
> how to avoid the problems in a noninteractive run. 

Bah! This is an admin tool. :) If people want hand-holding, there is
up2date and rhn for just $60 a year. ;)

> This is a very reasonable and time-tested model.  fsck worked (probably
> still works, although ext3 makes it less necessary:-) this way --
> anything that it couldn't handle in a noninteractive boot-time check
> required an interactive run to hand-fix the problems it found, hopefully
> restoring a state where noninteractive fsck'd clean once again.

I don't think we should compare fsck and yum. Fsck had everything needed
to fix broken partitions already available in the code. Yum doesn't.
Adding this interactivity for fsck was very simple, while for yum it
would mean extra thousands lines of code.

> It also provides a scalable way to insert new "helper" scriptlets
> designed to step users through specific problems if and when it is
> determined that doing so is less work than helping new users that
> inevitably encounter the problems.

Again, if people want to upgrade their systems, they should really be
using Anaconda -- it's got all that and a bag of [your favorite artery
blockage snack]. It has nice graphical interfaces, both gtk and newt,
with help screens and cute RH factoids for the times when you're just
watching your packages install. The only major concern that I see is
that you have to reboot your box to actually upgrade it, but maybe
that's actually the right way to do it. :)

Cheers,
-- 
 0>  Konstantin ("Icon") Riabitsev
/ )  Duke University Physics Sysadmin
 ~   www.phy.duke.edu/~icon/pubkey.asc
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