On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 2:34 PM, Xavier <shiningxc@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 08:20:58PM +0100, Nagy Gabor wrote:
OK. I've never heart complaints against -Rd and -Sd; they are the real database and system breakers. But they are optional, nobody said, that you must use any of them. The same for --nonew. And using it is _my_ responsibility, not the package manager's. [Btw, my philosophy: If I'm not allowed to break my system, then my freedom is restricted (or I am treated like a child);-)] This was a FR, and personally I find it also useful. I don't see why this is so dangerous (I mean it worth not to suffice some needs, while there are no regressions to others). [Btw, I think this patch ugly because of patching back-end instead of the front-end, not because of its philosophy]. I don't think, anyone can convince me about the (assumed) fact that this feature is bad, so I let the decision to Dan (as always). Technical discussion are welcome of course.
Well personally, I don't like Rd and Sd :) But you have a valid point, and that's also why I was never 100 % against your patch (even if I maybe made it sound like it :)). If we want to give more power to users, and then its their jobs to not do stupid things with it, then your patch is perfectly fine.
After thinking about this patch, I guess I have to give it a -1. Why? First, I'm just not sold that we need this type of behavior in libalpm. Like you said, this seems like something we should do in a frontend. It makes much more sense to me for a GUI tool to offer selections like this, but for a command line tool, I think we could script this behavior rather than modify the source. Second, I just have to draw the line somewhere with regards to new options and flags, and I just don't like this one enough to want to include it and have to support it into the future. Keep up the creative thought though- I'm glad to see we could do things like this if we wanted to. Perhaps we should ask- what would we need to do to libalpm to be able to easily do things like this from a frontend instead? -Dan