[pacman-dev] "local version is up to date. Upgrade anyway?" question

[Xavier]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 04:02:46PM +0100, Nagy Gabor wrote:
> > For testing the last patch from Nagy that makes the "dependency cycle"
> > warning more verbose, I wanted to do :
> > pacman -S base
> > But then cancel the operation.
> > The problem is that, for every package, I got the following question :
> > local version is up to date. Upgrade anyway?
> > 
> > I couldn't use --noconfirm , because I didn't want to actually do the
> > operation, only preview it.
> > Also, --noconfirm will answer other questions than this one.
> > 
> > Actually, this is exactly the issue that was mentioned in this thread :
> > http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=35901
> > The only way was to use the --ask option, which was too complicated and has
> > been removed. We probably don't need the power of this function anyway.
> > But maybe we could have a replacement, just for this "local version is up to
> > date" question.
> > Or, is this question really useful anyway? How often do we try installing an
> > already installed package, without the intention to reinstall it?
> 
> See also my comments here: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/8242
> 
> Well, I never used the --ask option before, so I don't know what that did. So I
> may want to (re)implement it.

You can see the above forum thread where I tried to explain it.
Or look at the commit where it was removed:
http://projects.archlinux.org/git/?p=pacman.git;a=commitdiff;h=1ff8e7f364a9f640ada7526384646d510ac29967

> 
> > Or maybe pacman could just print a warning instead :
> > # pacman -S foo
> > warning : foo is already installed
> > ...
> 
> This seems OK to me (if in this case foo will be upgraded): atm I cannot find
> any case when an already-installed package is pulled to target list "automatically".
> 

I guess it's mostly useful when you want to check that something is
installed. For example, you're following a guide on archwiki and you
copy/paste a pacman -S command, because you're not sure which tools are
installed.
So it looks like the two use cases are possible :
1) reinstalling all the packages
2) only install the missing ones

So it seems like in all cases, you want to either answer all the "Upgrade
anyway?" questions by yes, or all by no.
So maybe yet another option / flag would be better for choosing the answer
globally, instead of case by case :p