[arch-dev-public] pacman upgrade issue

[Aaron Griffin]

On 5/9/07, Jason Chu <jason at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 01:18:32PM -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> > On 5/9/07, Jason Chu <jason at archlinux.org> wrote:
> > > On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 12:52:31PM -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> > > > Jason, can you take this task on? I want to
> > > > a) figure out a solution to the pacman upgrade issue
> > > > b) deal with the package cleanup
> > > > So I don't have huge amounts of time to spare at the moment.
> > >
> > > I am also lacking in time.  Can you explain the pacman upgrade issue a
> > > little better (there was a bug report about it at one point, right?)?
> > >
> > > I will make sure something gets done, but I doubt I'll be the one to do it.
> >
> > Here we go.  I was about to move pacman 3 to current last night and
> > realized there is a minor show-stopper in the upgrade path.
> >
> > The way pacman 2.X works, when it finds an upgrade for itself, it
> > removes _ALL_ additional targets from the list and adds pacman.  At
> > this point, deps have already been resolved.
> >
> > So, the new pacman depends on libdownload and libarchive.  Clearing
> > out the target list also removes these.  So pacman will download
> > pacman3, then try to install it, and fail because dependencies are
> > missing.
> >
> > This is not a critical issue, as one can easilly -S those two, but it
> > is not clean.  When this moves to current, there will be many people
> > with problems, and not everyone checks the news items / reads the
> > forums.
> >
> > The use case will go as follows:
> > pacman -Syu
> > "New pacman is available, upgrade? [Y/n]" Y
> > ...download pacman 3...
> > Whoops, cannot find dependencies "libdownload" or "libarchive", failing
> > "Hmmm, wtf?"
> > pacman -S libdownload libarchive
> > pacman -Syu
> >
> > Again, this is not critical, not fatal, and not a big deal, it is just
> > messy.  I want to figure out if there is some good way to do this, but
> > I do not think so.
>
> Can we release a new version of pacman 2.X that downloads deps of pacman
> when it finds a pacman update?  I don't know how much work this is.

The problem there is that in order for that to work, that 2.X release
would need to remain in the repos for a while, to ensure that most
users have an upgradeable version.  If we put the new 2.X release out
there for, say, a week, some users might miss the upgrade and run into
the same issue.

> Having the feature to download deps of pacman as well as pacman when doing
> the "New pacman is available" steps makes a lot of sense for situations
> like this in the future.

True, but that's just an issue of foresight.  It took years to
actually manifest as an issue, and even then it's rather minor.