On Wed, Sep 08, 2010 at 10:22:30AM +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
I'm a long-time KDE user, familiar with Fedora and new to OpenSUSE. I find I am getting far fewer updates than expected, with huge numbers of packages apparently protected against updates. I understand the principle, but would value some help in finding documentation about the various repositories and setting priorities, since I assume this is my problem. Amongst other things I would like to move to KDE 4.5, which I had in Fedora.
There are two mechanisms at work regarding package selection: 1) vendor stickiness a package is only considered an update candidate if it has the same vendor as the installed package. As most buildservice repositories have different vendors this makes the package stick to a repository. To change a package to a different repository, you have to manually select the package from a different repo (i.e. by specifying --from or the exact version) or use 'zypper dup', which ignores the vendor. You can also disable vendor stickiness by setting solver.allowVendorChange to true in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf 2) repository priorities before comparing package versions, libzypp checks the priorities of the repositories the packages come from. A lower number means higher priority, where "99" is the default priority. If you want packages from a specific repository you have two options: - manually switch the packages you like to the ones of the repository and rely on the vendor stickiness. (you can also do a bulk switch by using 'zypper dup --from' or the "switch packages" link in yast) - change the repo priority of the repository you like to a lower value and do a 'zypper dup' or 'zypper dup --from'. The main difference is that if you later on do a 'zypper in' of a package you had not installed before, the update stack will use the package from the KDE45 repo in the second case, as the priority of that repo is better. So if you just want to try out a few manually selected packages from KDE45, you should go rely on vendor stickiness, if you want a complete switch you should use repo priorities. Cheers, Michael. -- Michael Schroeder mls@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF Markus Rex, HRB 16746 AG Nuernberg main(_){while(_=~getchar())putchar(~_-1/(~(_|32)/13*2-11)*13);} -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org