On Tue, May 24, 2022 at 9:55 AM Martin Wilck
On Mon, 2022-05-23 at 21:22 +0300, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
On 23.05.2022 19:50, Martin Wilck wrote:
I believe that we have better instruments than "Recommends" these days, in particular booleans. In the example at hand, we could create a pseudo-package by the name of, say, "system-requires-wifi". Yast would install this package automatically during system setup if Wifi hardware was deteced. Then Networkmanager could have a dependency like this:
Requires: (NetworkManager-wifi = %{version} if system-requires- wifi)
a) If YaST can detect wifi during setup YaST can also install NetworkManager-wifi. Yet another dummy package makes no sense.
It's more flexible. Even if the wifi hw wasn't present during installation, or if the user doesn't use YaST, she could install "system-requires-wifi" later. Or uninstall it if she decides she isn't going to use wifi any more.
Even if the wifi hw wasn't present during installation, or if the user doesn't use YaST, she could install "NetworkManager-wifi" later. Or uninstall it if she decides she isn't going to use wifi any more. Again - why is indirection via an additional package needed?
b) how exactly is it going to help those users who got broken system during simple update?
By making sure Networkmanager wouldn't be installed without Networkmanager-wifi? That was the idea at least. If you think it wouldn't work, please explain.
As usual on openSUSE lists, the original problem was long forgotten. It is not about how to auto-select NetworkManager-wifi during *new* system installation (this is a different, although related, problem). In the past the NetworkManager package included WiFi support. Now WiFi support was split into the separate package recommended by NetworkManager. If a user configured system to not install recommends by default, on update the user will not have NetworkManager-wifi installed and WiFi stops working. For a lot of users this is equivalent to bricking their system (they cannot as much as post the question anymore). In this thread was a suggestion how this can be fixed - by using split-alias which is documented on our wiki and actually seems to work (at least in my limited testing) and costs a single line in the spec file. But given the attitude "this is a self-inflicted wound" apparently nobody is interested in making this more friendly for end-users. Which is not surprising at all ...