[pacman-dev] bogus reinstalling message

[Xavier]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
>

First, thanks for the feedback!

> 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.)

I agree that these warning messages are annoying and rather useless.

However, I like the idea of having a simple wrapper to vercmp handling
the force flag (and maybe the epoch idea in 10 years :P)

Finally, why is it odd to mention 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.

Could you be much more precise here?

There are 3 different values returned by compare_versions, and 2
values for the needed flag, which makes 6 different combination.

downgrade only applies when compare_versions == -1 and with both
values of needed (because of point 2. below)

reinstall happens when compare_versions == 0 and needed == 0

So you want to display these messages only in these cases? And nothing
in the other cases? (like skipping when compare_versions == 0 and
needed == 1)

> 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.
>

Good point, I made this patch a while ago and I don't even know if I
realized that. At least I don't remember anymore.
Thinking about it now, I prefer the new behavior and see my change as
a fix. But I agree this should clearly appear in the commit log.