On Fri, 2022-01-21 at 18:20 -0500, John Mellor wrote:
>
> Ok, so would that allowance not violate 2 of the proposed criteria:
>
>  1. * The displayed state of software or software sources must not
>     differ from their actual state. (E.g. an RPM package must not be
>     shown as installed when it is not, a repository must not be shown as
>     disabled or missing when it is enabled, etc).
>  2. * The package manager must never make the system enter an
>     inconsistent or unbootable state. (E.g. damage the local software
>     database, remove wrong system files, break the bootloader, etc).

We probably should carve out an allowance there, in fact, yeah. Kamil,
what do you think?

I think that I don't understand what the issue is :-) Can you re-phrase "carve out an allowance" and be more specific?

If this is about power outages, I don't see any problem here. A power outage is not the package manager's failure, and so those criteria don't apply.

If this is about working with an already broken system (broken rpmdb or similar), the package manager again didn't cause this state (it didn't "make the system enter an inconsistent state"), and so again that criterion doesn't apply. It could possibly display incorrect state of e.g. rpm packages, if rpmdb is broken (but who can say what the actual state is, when the db is broken?), but the same issue could then apply e.g. to "must install, remove and update software".

We could add a footer "these criteria only apply when the system is in a consistent state", but in that case we might need to add such a footer to most of our criteria :-) E.g. a file browser must be able to copy files only when the filesystem is in a consistent state.

I would expect that these cases would be considered a conditional blocker, the condition being that the system was broken before, and therefore waived, because on a broken system we can't guarantee anything.

Or was this about something different?