[pacman-dev] Some comments on Bryan patches (bugs)

[Nagy Gabor]

> Nagy Gabor wrote:
> >
> > Bump on these. As I see, 1-2 are fixed now (mentioned in the first
> > mail of this thread). But the "duplicated messages/data-list" issue
> > is still here. After my "Print warning in _alpm_resolvedep() if a
> > satisfier package is ignored without QUESTION" patch this issue
> > became even worse, maybe that patch should be reverted, I dunno...
> >
> > The most precise [but ugly source-code] solution would be the
> > following (imho): Maintain a dropped list for dropped
> > (unresolvable) packages. This would prevent duplicated work (and
> > duplicated messages), and this would speed-up our algorithm a bit
> > in xav's example.
> >
> > Bye
> >   
> 
> Hi, I was on vacation in Australia for 3 weeks and am in the process
> of moving now, so I'm really out of the loop here.  I can barely
> remember the issues involved here.  I believe I submitted two patches
> before I left that solved some of the issues that were pointed out by
> Nagy.  Have these been accepted into the pacman sources?  Nagy, are
> you running your test with these patches?

Your "Look in target-list first to resolve dependencies" and "Remove
duplicates from the unresolvable list before..." patches were accepted.
 
> If so, then I agree that the final problems that exist are ugly, but 
> fortunately just cosmetic.
> 
> I also continue to believe that the warning message you've added
> about ignored packages is unnecessary.  The user knows what packages
> they've put in their ignore list and that these packages may be
> ignored at any time as dependency satisfiers.  I don't think they
> need to be warned about it.  At the very least, it should be an
> optional warning turned on by a command-line flag.  That's my opinion
> anyway.
> 
> If your warning is taken out, what does the new output of pacman look 
> like in the situation you are reporting?  I imagine there are still
> some duplicated messages, but what exactly?

The problem is that pacman may want to pull a package many times
(without success, of course), and all the warnings around this package
may be echoed many times:
a. provider package was selected
b. cannot resolve "foo", a dependency of "bar"
c. ignoring package [NEW].

Basically, I think that a. is useful, because pacman's automatic
provision selection is not always suitable for the user [libgl], b. can
be simply removed (finally we always print a nice error message,
which should be tuned using causingpkg, read back ;-), c. may be
unnecessary (But I don't really like when pacman is totally silent
about IgnorePkg. Don't forget that we also have IgnoreGroup.).

My standpoint is that some of these messages are useful, but at most
once ;-). I have no clear solution for this issue, we may have to make
some compromises...

Bye