On Tuesday 09 October 2007 17:44, Aniruddha wrote:
I have attached two examples
Please don't top-quote. This makes answering a real pain.
My solution is simple; just automatically remove the conflicting files and let the user know you are doing that. Or provide sane default setting which can be easily agreed upon.
I see what you mean. We had that once, but this is really something that is
very dangerous and thus not desirable in most cases.
The old package manager used to come up with a solution like "delete all
conflicting packages" - getting rid of everything that depended on the
package you marked for deletion.
While this can be useful in some very few cases, in many more cases it will
leave you with a wrecked system.
Marked kdebase3 for deletion? The proposed solution would be to remove all
packages that depend on it, which means all of KDE. OK, that might still be
something that a few users might want every now and then.
But we have more base packages whose purpose is not so obvious to the
not-so-informed user. XML libs come to mind. While some users might think "I
don't like or want to use XML", a lot of packages depend on it directly or
indirectly. Of course, a "delete all depending packages" solution would
include all indirect dependencies as well.
You'd be amazed how much free space you'd have on your hard disk after that...
Only you wouldn't have a working system any more. Well, not quite. Working -
yes. It would have a kernel and a shell etc.; but you'd probably hate to use
what would be left of your desktop. ;-)
In the old (pre-10.1) package manager we offered that kind of solution. But
frankly, it was never very useful. And those users who selected that probably
had to reinstall the system in most cases.
I don't think it's a good idea to reintroduce that kind of behaviour. It hurts
more than it could possibly heal.
CU
--
Stefan Hundhammer