* Duncan Mac-Vicar P. [Jul 25. 2007 18:43]:

I don't understand much the best-effort thing. Can you ellaborate?

Sure. The current approach to "zypper up" is the following foreach (installed-resolvable) do candidates = uninstalled-resolvables-with-same-name-as-installed-resolvable best = nil foreach (candidates) do if (best == nil) best = candidate else if (best.version < candidate.version) best = candidate end mark-for-installation( best ) end It looks for update candidates for installed resolvables and picks the 'best' (highest version) for installation. With only the official update repo enabled, this algorithm of blindly upgrading to latest-and-greates works nicely. However, it calls for trouble when multiple repos provide updates. The probability of conflicting upgrades is much higher here, esp. when kernel/driver upgrades come into play. Best effort tries to give the dependency solver more freedom when choosing upgrades. The algorithm is like: foreach (installed-resolvable) do candidates = uninstalled-resolvables-with-same-name-as-installed-resolvable foreach (candidates) do if (installed.version < candidate.version) solver.require (installed-name > installed-version) end end end This checks if an upgrade candidate exists at all and just tells the solver to raise the respective installed resolvable to a higher version. Here the dependency solver is free to choose a lower than latest-and-greatest version, thereby enlarging the solution domain. This approach is still flawed since it does not allow to keep the version of an installed resolvable despite the existance of upgrade candidates. But as I said, the primary purpose is to gain experience. The more important extension to zypper is probably '--from-repo' which limits upgrade candidates to a specific repository. This is a first step to give repository 'weights' and do selective upgrades. One might e.g. want to follow a specific buildservice project (KDE4 comes into mind) or focus on the official update repo. Hth, Klaus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: zypp-devel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: zypp-devel+help@opensuse.org