[pacman-dev] [PATCH] New --nonew option (resubmit)

[Xavier]

2008/3/7 Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu>:
> >
>  > heh, so many-many gtk2-dependant packages should have
>  > depends=('gtk2>=2..4/2.6/2.8/210/whatever')
>  > this is just unreal, nobody will want to check that stuff (because
>  > it's not trivial and consumes valuable time)
>  >
>  1. A bit off-topic, about packaging:
>  * Well, obviously nobody wants to recheck existing packages... Hopefully your
>  distro's packaging policy declares that dependencies should be filled in correctly.
>  * If I cannot assume this, then what can I expect from the packager? Almost all
>  projects have an INSTALL file or something which defines clearly the minimal
>  version of its dependencies (or can be caught easily from configure.ac).
>  * To be more concrete: with ArchLinux I had only about 3 missing depver issues
>  for ~5 years, after reporting them, they were fixed soon.
>

Well, did you try to break it, or did you more or less do normal upgrades?
If you are not trying to do anything stupid, it will probably work
well. But if you are trying every possible combinations
of different package versions, you will probably find much more problems.

>  2. Summarize my opinion: if user can select any set of packages for upgrade (see
>  also: upcoming GUIs), I don't see why they are forced to do some shell magic to
>  do what they want.
>
>

Users can select any set of packages to install. Otherwise, that would
be a rather odd package manager.
But it just turns out that installing a version of package from a repo
when you already have an older package == upgrading.