[pacman-dev] Another proposal for the "-Sy libjpeg" problem

[Xavier]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 3:42 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> I think the problem is known for everyone, if a user upgrades a package
>> (without -Su), he can easily get "error while loading shared libraries".
>>
>> The most perfect (but maybe overkill) solution is Florian's one:
>> http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2009-August/009158.html
>> (that patch needs some work on optdepends side, but that is not so
>> complicated.)
>>
>> I mention a simpler one: Add a new switch to upgrade reversedeps too
>> (recursively), ie. "pacman -S --reversedeps libjpeg" would upgrade all
>> packages depend on (the local) libjpeg. This should be straightforward
>> to implement and imho this is a bit more sophisticated than the "pacman
>> -Syu libjpeg" request (see bugs.archlinux.org :-P).
>>
>> Opinions?
>
> Did you ever think about this more? I'm not sure I like the name of
> the flag, but the idea is interesting. I have the feeling more times
> than not it will pull in a *lot* of things (something equivalent to
> doing -Rsc <pkgname>) in order to be "correct".
>

So basically we would almost be back to -Su.
Anyway there is a very simple answer to all theses problems : regular -Syu
Now if the user don't do that, it suddenly all gets much more complex.
The question is : do we want to support that ?

- Yes : then we probably needs to go the sodepends/soprovides way, as
this seems to be the only completely safe way
- Yes , No, Maybe : we can add the --reversedeps option, which might
help a bit, but not solve the problem
- No : we keep telling user than the only supported way is to keep
doing -Syu regularly