Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (392 mails)

[Martin Schlander <suse@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Den Tuesday 17 April 2007 14:56:30 skrev Klaus Kaempf:
> Package locks try to provide a solution for the following
> use-cases
>
> Proposals anyone ?

First of all I think these benefits are far outweighed by the problems the 
locks cause. So in my view the auto-locking could be just removed.

Worst case a few people lose some functionaly temporarily. They would always 
be able to downgrade again if they have issues. And after trying that a 
couple of times they'll hopefully learn to pay attention to what they 
upgrade.

But of course it's a valid point. For example you install Pascal's nice 
ktorrent package - and if you don't pay attention when updating you might get 
the crippled one from OBS with no DHT.

Don't know if this could be taken care of with some versioning conventions, 
that could perhaps ensure that 3rd party packages are always 
considered "newer". 

One thing that could possibly diminish the problems that having no locks could 
cause, and at the same time solve a different issue, would be if it was 
somehow made more apparent in sw_single when more versions of a package are 
available.

In the present state the user has to actively go to the "versions" tab and 
check. In the Smart-gui all packages are listed as individual packages even 
if they're different versions of the same package. Maybe sw_single could be 
made to behave in a way that's a kind of compromise between the two "radical" 
approaches. Maybe the list could have some kind of tree-format, like with 
folders - and a little [+] showing that there are actually more versions of 
this package avaialable. Maybe it should only be done in case there are 
packages available from different "vendors" - otherwise it could become messy 
on x86_64 (biarch) systems. 

Hopefully if people are informed that more versions are available they'll 
think twice about which they update to.

Another issue is that if you update using sw_single -> "Package" -> "All 
packages" -> "Update if newer version is available" the locks are disregarded 
anyway. So in the ktorrent example you are very likely to have your 
guru-package replaced with the OBS-package despite the lock. If there were no 
locks at all, this way of updating could assume the user actively locked 
locked packages, and therefore respect the locks. The way it is now, whether 
Pascals package is locked or not, it will be updated if I use this method of 
updating.
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