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

[Dan McGee]

On Nov 21, 2007 10:33 AM, Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

This seems like the mirror of your --unneeded option, in a way. Not
sure if --needed is really the best way to describe it, but it is a
possibility.

This would also allow us to remove the -F option if we ported it to
-U/-A as well.

-Dan