Mailinglist Archive: zypp-devel (47 mails)

[Volker Kuhlmann <list0570@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu 28 May 2009 22:29:57 NZST +1200, Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett wrote:

> > addrepo (ar) [options] <URI> <alias>
> > addrepo (ar) [options] <FILE.repo>
> >
> > The second version is missing the <alias> specification.
>
> You are confused, as the repo file includes the alias. That is the sole
> purpose of a .repo file, it has the alias, url and other settings
> together in one file.

Then zypper is buggy, because ar uri.repo aliasstring inserts
aliasstring for *both* alias and name. See lr. Nice would be to overide
the alias in the .repo when specified on the command line (ditto for the
other fields).

> name is just a description. What do you expect here?, that it takes all
> information from the .repo file _except_ the alias you are giving to it?

I don't much care whether the description is called name or description.
What I expect is that a repo has a short name which can be used easily
on the command line (i.e. not too long, unique, and no spaces), and a
description that tells me what the repo is good for.

Yast's unhelpful setting of aliases to "repoN" doesn't help. It does
that at least for the preconfigured community repos that can be added
with a tick. Last time I tried adding repos with yast by one-click
install yast made a hash of it too, whether that was because the alias
in the .repo was badly chosen (i.e. anything not meeting my definition
above) or whether yast just plain mangles things here I don't know, but
I've given up on yast here for the time being.

Adding repos manually means I either have to specify a useful alias when
adding and then manually setting the description back afterwards, or
adding the repo and going through the filesystem and fixing up the alias
string manually.

There isn't an option to rename aliases, though it's not difficult to do
manually, but it would be a useful feature to tidy up the mess.

There's also no way in yast to set "keep packages" when adding
(community?) repos, which if I want to keep the packages makes one-click
install a many-clicks-manually-tidy-up install. I insist on keeping
packages so I have at least what I needed myself so I can back it up /
copy it for offline use.

> name == description, alias is what you expect from a short name. Blame
> the yum guys for their taste on naming (that is why you also find tags
> named_like_this and others named-like-this). We try to be compatible
> instead of inventing yet more names.

There is a good case for compatibility. It's a shame that there wasn't
anything better to be compatible to :( Looking at the idiotic priorities
(it goes down when it goes up - d'oh) one gets the feeling it was
"designed" by a unix programmer capable of hacking it up in an afternoon
but without much clout (or care) about making it usable ;)

> So a example of "name" is : "openSUSE 11.1 repo"
> An example of alias is: "opensuse11"

That would be just fine.

> That is the alias. And I can see it. It also shows the numbers, which
> you can also use. Be careful that numbers change once you add and remove
> repos, at is the ordering number.

Yes, that's why the ordering number isn't that safe as repo
identification in commands.

Cheers,

Volker

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Volker Kuhlmann                 is list0570 with the domain in header
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