[pacman-dev] Addition of a new package in a package group and how pacman handles it
Hey all I will briefly describe the situation: yesterday, Gnome 2.24 hit the repos. I issued "pacman -Suy" and, lo and behold, next time I logged in I was running Gnome 2.24. So far so good. But then I noticed that certain parts of Gnome were not there at all! It turns out, it doesn't matter if I have originally installed the package group named gnome and gnome-extras, their contents have changed (new packages added) but I did not get the new packages. Instead I had to issue a pacman -Suy --needed gnome gnome-extras in order to get the full package list. Now, I was wondering if this is on purpose or not and in my humble opinion, this is very counter-intuitive. When I first issued the "full upgrade" command, I didn't merely expect the system to bring all my packages to the latest version, I expected to have a "current" system, exactly as it would be if I had done a clean install. In fact, that's the main reason for choosing Arch: the fact that it is rolling release! This means, I expected the package manager to be smart enough to say "Aha, he wanted gnome and gnome-extras back then and I see no reason for him to *not* want the new gnome and gnome-extras now, let's install them!" Granted, this could be circumvented by issuing: $pacman --needed -Suy gnome gnome-extras but why should I be on the lookout for when a new gnome is out, for instance? Isn't that the job of the package manager? Here's an idea: why not keep track of package groups the user has *explicitly* installed and then by doing a "full-full upgrade" (let's say pacman -Syuu, double u), bring the new packages in? I could also argue that this behaviour should be the default one. Thoughts?
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 11:42 AM, wg2k <weight.gain.2000@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey all
I will briefly describe the situation: yesterday, Gnome 2.24 hit the repos. I issued "pacman -Suy" and, lo and behold, next time I logged in I was running Gnome 2.24. So far so good. But then I noticed that certain parts of Gnome were not there at all!
It turns out, it doesn't matter if I have originally installed the package group named gnome and gnome-extras, their contents have changed (new packages added) but I did not get the new packages. Instead I had to issue a pacman -Suy --needed gnome gnome-extras in order to get the full package list.
Now, I was wondering if this is on purpose or not and in my humble opinion, this is very counter-intuitive. When I first issued the "full upgrade" command, I didn't merely expect the system to bring all my packages to the latest version, I expected to have a "current" system, exactly as it would be if I had done a clean install. In fact, that's the main reason for choosing Arch: the fact that it is rolling release! This means, I expected the package manager to be smart enough to say "Aha, he wanted gnome and gnome-extras back then and I see no reason for him to *not* want the new gnome and gnome-extras now, let's install them!"
Granted, this could be circumvented by issuing: $pacman --needed -Suy gnome gnome-extras but why should I be on the lookout for when a new gnome is out, for instance? Isn't that the job of the package manager?
Here's an idea: why not keep track of package groups the user has *explicitly* installed and then by doing a "full-full upgrade" (let's say pacman -Syuu, double u), bring the new packages in? I could also argue that this behaviour should be the default one. Thoughts?
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 11:58 AM, wg2k <weight.gain.2000@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm terribly sorry, I wasn't aware of that!!
Don't be sorry- I just wanted to point out that this has been brought up before. Perhaps it would be helpful to add any comments you made there if they weren't already addressed. I also wanted to make you aware of some of the issues group tracking has from the coding side of things. -Dan
participants (2)
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Dan McGee
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wg2k