nvr issues, yum distro-sync

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2010-05-27 at 21:35 +0100, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> On 27 May 2010 20:58, Matt McCutchen <matt at mattmccutchen.net> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2010-05-27 at 15:03 -0400, James Antill wrote:
> >>  While it's not good packaging, most of the time these bad versions
> >> don't cause any problems.
> >
> > It's better to have the packages that are supported (to the extent that
> > the community provides support) for the distribution version being used
> > and won't appear in "package-cleanup --orphans".
> 
> Yes - this is rather important, because our user facing docs (on the
> wiki) for preupgrade recommend removing all packages identified with
> package-cleanup --orphans. A naive user could literally wipe out their
> system by blindly doing that. That's my main concern - we should not
> be leaving landmines for users.

Sure, though I would hope the user would stop a removal of 1500 packages
and complain on the list like Klaus did.

Another solution is to move away from incremental maintenance of the set
of installed packages and instead solve the dependencies from scratch on
each yum run, starting with a list of "wanted" packages maintained by
the sysadmin.  This would take some discipline to get right, but it has
the major benefit that systems can no longer get stuck in an unusual or
"wrong" state.  I believe aptitude remembers which of the installed
packages were "wanted" and then automatically removes unwanted leaves,
but the general approach is still incremental rather than from-scratch.

-- 
Matt