[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Pierre Chapuis]

Le Tue, 9 Feb 2010 09:12:29 +0100,
fons at kokkinizita.net a écrit :

> On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 08:02:04PM -0700, Brendan Long wrote:
> 
> > Except then you'd annoy everyone who wants their package manager to work
> > properly. When I update a package I expect it to clean up after itself.
> 
> Work properly = not remove things that are still needed.
> Clean up after itself = remove them when no longer needed.
> 
> The situation is now very clear. Pacman in its current
> form just *can't* do this, and this defect is being
> presented as a virtue, which is a classical marketing
> scenario.

There are package managers that can do that, I think apt-get is one.
Pacman can not by design because it is made for rolling release
distributions: the system is considered to be always up to date, all of
it. You are not supposed to update just part of it.

Now if you agree to that you have too problems:

1) Sometimes installing new packages drag updates of libraries. Simple
solution: never use pacman -Sy, always -Syu; if you want to install a
package without updating everything use -S without the y.

2) There are problems with mirror sync. This is a *mirror sync*
problem, not a Pacman problem. And by the way, the mirror I use doesn't
have that problem because it updates the database files before the
packages themselves. Because of that, if some packages are out of date,
you get transient resolver failures at download time on -Syu and pacman
just doesn't update. All you have to do is try again later... Updating
all the database files *last* would be even better: there would never
be any sync problem (if I understand well how it works).

-- 
catwell