Mike wrote:
Okay, I thought you're talking about the installation cd's or ftp.suse.com as install. source for packages of the distribution. yast2 only works on a full install. tree incl. all those helper files that you find on cd, where yast(2) gets its ino from. It doesn't work for indiviudual packages.
And therein lies the problem. Yast1 had this "feature" and it would resolve depencies when installing groups of packages. As an example, I could download the entire kde directory when an update like 2.2.2 came out, start yast1, and it would install the files in the right order. I didn't have to know which order to install them. FWIW, I did try using just rpm to install a group of packages, and for some reason it wouldn't work right. Yast1 did the job correctly the first time.
You could also delete packages and yast1 would let you know if you were about to mess up your system.
yast1 did not know about dependencies of individual packages. yast2 and yast1 both use/used their own dependency info, independent from the rpm stuff. One of the reasons: the rpm only says "Requires: libxyz.so", it doesn't say which other package contains this lib (and if you don't happen to have that package you will never know, so simply scanning all packages for what they provide won't help). To update using "rpm", for the kde upgrade example you give, I'd do rpm -F *.rpm over the list of all downloaded kde upgrade rpm's. There's not really any way to automated any errors you may get like "reuires libxyz", if that lib is new and not part of suse linux, because then there's no way for yast2 to know where on earth it could find that lib. So installation of indiv. packages via yast2 won't make that problem go away... some manual dependency resolution via reading installation docs, release notes, READMEs will always be required...
look at http://sdb.suse.com/, there's an article for how to install packages in suse linux. I just found it when I checked for all articles for SL 8.0. Basically, use e.g. kpackage or just plain "rpm"...
I can use rpm all day long. Don't really like Kpackage. Yast2 is modular, and I would bet that yast1 was similar. Seems like it wouldn't be that much trouble to take that part of yast1 and put it in Yast2.
Yes, installation of indiv. packages should (and I believe will) be part of yast2. Michael