Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (661 mails)

[Stefan Seyfried <stefan.seyfried@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 08:57:14 +0000
Rob OpenSuSE <rob.opensuse.linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 2009/12/4 Stefan Seyfried <stefan.seyfried@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> > But the repository metadata could have an extra file with
> > no-longer-present packages, which would only be consulted if e.g.
> > "zypper search" finds out that the package is not available. It
> > could even be used to point to alternate repositories etc...
>
> To me the package management has enough work, managing the current

Agreed. That's why I suggested having it in an extra file (but probably
part of the repo metadata, to be able to keep it up-to-date with the
rest of the system) that would only be queried if the solver decides
that he cannot find a package. It would not slow down the resolver etc,
since the data would not even be loaded in memory at that time. And of
course the feature could be trivially easy be turned off.

> packages in repo's without having cruft of discontinued packages
> accreting gradually in future releases.  It may be confusing to have
> packages listed, that are actually not installable.  Having such would
> likely mean requests to have "discontinued" & "active" filter in YaST
> Software Manager.

They would not be listed. Only if you would search for, say, "yacc", it
would point you to "bison". (Phew, avoided the cdr<censored> example ;)

Maybe also command-not-found could query this database.

> Traditionally this is kind of thing you expect to find in the Release
> Notes, but that has never been especially effective.

Yes, and to be honest, I am not reading hte release notes that often
(because I always run FACTORY), but I still would find such a feature
useful.

> Now there's a utility been introduced "cnf" to report information to
> the user who can query missing commands, it validates PATH and
> searches in package repo.  Couldn't it also search in a DB of
> "discontinued" of dropped files and package names, and return summary
> info, suggested alternative and URL to the drop announcement web page
> which has the  rationale?
>
> Keeps the information "out of band" and in a non-critical part of the
> system.

Oops, we roughly had the same idea ;)
If it only shows up in cnf or also in "zypper search -> not found" is
basically an implementation detail.
-- 
Stefan Seyfried

"Any ideas, John?"
"Well, surrounding them's out."
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