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

[Dan McGee]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 2:34 PM, Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 08:20:58PM +0100, Nagy Gabor wrote:
>  > >
>  > OK. I've never heart complaints against -Rd and -Sd; they are
>  > the real database and system breakers. But they are optional, nobody
>  > said, that you must use any of them. The same for --nonew. And using it
>  > is _my_ responsibility, not the package manager's. [Btw, my philosophy:
>  > If I'm not allowed to break my system, then my freedom is restricted
>  > (or I am treated like a child);-)]
>  > This was a FR, and personally I find it also useful. I don't see why
>  > this is so dangerous (I mean it worth not to suffice some needs,
>  > while there are no regressions to others). [Btw, I think this patch ugly
>  > because of patching back-end instead of the front-end, not because of
>  > its philosophy].
>  > I don't think, anyone can convince me about the (assumed) fact that this
>  > feature is bad, so I let the decision to Dan (as always). Technical
>  > discussion are welcome of course.
>  >
>
>  Well personally, I don't like Rd and Sd :)
>  But you have a valid point, and that's also why I was never 100 % against
>  your patch (even if I maybe made it sound like it :)). If we want to give
>  more power to users, and then its their jobs to not do stupid things with
>  it, then your patch is perfectly fine.

After thinking about this patch, I guess I have to give it a -1. Why?

First, I'm just not sold that we need this type of behavior in
libalpm. Like you said, this seems like something we should do in a
frontend. It makes much more sense to me for a GUI tool to offer
selections like this, but for a command line tool, I think we could
script this behavior rather than modify the source.

Second, I just have to draw the line somewhere with regards to new
options and flags, and I just don't like this one enough to want to
include it and have to support it into the future.

Keep up the creative thought though- I'm glad to see we could do
things like this if we wanted to. Perhaps we should ask- what would we
need to do to libalpm to be able to easily do things like this from a
frontend instead?

-Dan