On 08/15/2017 03:47 AM, Paul Gideon Dann via arch-general wrote:
Yes, partial upgrades are unsupported, but in practice this still happens, usually not deliberately. For instance, I will quite often do a "pacman -S <package>" without doing a full system update first, assuming that *probably* nothing important has changed since the last update. It's a sloppy practice, but humans cut corners: it happens. When a plugin relies on a potentially unstable ABI (not many applications offer stable ABIs), specifying that the plugin package requires that exact version of the application will ensure that mistakes like this don't happen.
If I see an error like "package x requires y=1.2.3" when installing a package, the first thing I'll try is a system update, an obscure segfault is avoided, and everyone's happy. So the failsafe does the job. It's good defensive practice by the packaging team, I think.
What. No, the packaging team explicitly does not care about you, and official policy is to yell at you for having once upon a time run pacman -Sy without -u That is pretty deliberate on your part. -- Eli Schwartz