[pacman-dev] bogus reinstalling message

[Nagy Gabor]

> On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This issue has been known for ages, and it is easy to fix it, so I
> > would like to do it.
> > http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2008-May/011885.html
> > Example of a bogus output taken from the forums (the thread does not
> > talk about this issue though) :
> > http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=343166#p343166
> >
> > My attached solution simply removes the messages, which are in my
> > opinion useless. But I asked if it was a problem here :
> > http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2008-June/012095.html
> > If this is a problem, the rest of my patch will allow me to easily
> > reintroduce these messages when they are relevant.
> >
> 
> To be clearer, here are the 3 situations possible :
> 
> 1) local version (release 1) is older than sync (2)
> 
> myhost% LANG=C sudo pacman -S bash
> resolving dependencies...
> looking for inter-conflicts...
> 
> Targets (1): bash-3.2.039-2
> 
> 2) local and sync are the same : 2
> 
> myhost% LANG=C sudo pacman -S bash
> warning: bash-3.2.039-2 is up to date -- reinstalling
> resolving dependencies...
> looking for inter-conflicts...
> 
> Targets (1): bash-3.2.039-2
> 
> 3) local (3) is newer than sync (2)
> 
> myhost% LANG=C sudo pacman -S bash
> warning: bash: local (3.2.039-3) is newer than core (3.2.039-2)
> warning: bash-3.2.039-3 is up to date -- reinstalling
> resolving dependencies...
> looking for inter-conflicts...
> 
> Targets (1): bash-3.2.039-2
> 
> 
> 1) and 2) are already fine.
> Only 3) is wrong : here we don't want to display the "up to date"
> message. _______________________________________________

0. I don't like this _alpm_pkg_compare_versions() function at all, it
has some annoying warning messages (why is the "forcing upgrade..."
message important?), these reduce its usability (hardwired "upgrade"
word etc.). This function is just a vercmp + force check + printing
some (useless?) warnings. (The second "downgrade" warning also seems a
bit odd in "-S target" operation because of mentioning the repo.)
1. After your patch we won't display warning in 2) case neither
(as you wrote in patch description). I am not sure this is better. I
would simply inform user about both downgrade (but not in
pkg_compare_versions!) and reinstall instead.
2. The patch silently modifies (fixes?) --needed behavior (probably
this is why you changed its description, but it wasn't clear to
me first): Before your patch --needed prevented us from _downgrade_ too,
now it will allow it.

Bye