[Yum-devel] [PATCH/RFC] What to do if a plugin fails to load?

[Russell Harrison]

On 6/13/07, James Antill <jantill at redhat.com> wrote:

> > > Not to make things more difficult, but some plugins may be more vital
> than
> > > others -- in some cases, running with a plugin disabled may really
> screw up
> > > the system. (For example, protectbase.)
>
> Personally, I can't think of any major cases[1] where a plugin is going
> to be so important that it's better to not run yum at all.
> Even when you have edge cases like yum-security is broken, it's almost
> certainly better to have "yum --security update -y" do a full update in
> than to just fail and do nothing, even if it has a good error message.


I think the example of protectbase, priorities, and security are good plugin
examples where I would rather yum failed to run entirely rather than do a
full update.  If I have say the rpmforge repository enabled but set at a low
priority (using the priorities plugin) doing a full update would trash my
whole system since some of the packages in that repository replace packages
in the base repository, or perhaps I have a different repo with

Also for development groups if say the security plugin failed to install and
yum update every library they've linked against they'd have to rebuild a
bunch of stuff.  I'd rather not deal with the cranky developers myself,
considering downgrades still aren't straightforward, (especially if the
plugins aren't loading) and yum doesn't have a "rollback" option.

> > How about making "failure mode" a
> > > standard configuration option in the conf file for each plugin?


I like this option since everyone is going to have a different idea of which
plugings are "critical" and which ones are informational.

> And then you get to "what if reading the conf file fails"?


Doesn't the config file have to be readable in order for the plugin to
attempt to load anyway?

> Realistically, we just need to decide on a line and stick to it.  Either
> > a) Failure to load a plugin just disables the plugin


-1 for the reasons above.

> b) Failure to load a plugin aborts with a nice-ish error message


+1 if it can't be configurable I'd prefer yum failed cleanly rather than
upgrading everything

----
Russell Harrison
Systems Administrator -- Linux Desktops
Cisco Systems, Inc.
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