yum clean bug

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 06:25 +1030, n0dalus wrote:
>> For that matter, why should `yum clean packages` only clean packages
>> in enabled repos? The entire conversation could apply equally to all
>> the clean sub-commands. Just saying that 'all' is the combination of
>> all the other clean commands doesn't actually change the discussion in
>> any meaninful way.
>>
>> Yum is doing just as much guess work by assuming the user doesn't want
>> disabled/removed repos to be cleaned. It has already been concluded in
>> the leading discussion that 'all' is simply an ambiguous word in this
>> case and that the documentation might benefit from improvements
>> reflecting this.
>
> You are correct.  Yum is guessing and guessing is prone to error.  But,
> since we are prone to error, we're going to error on the safe side, and
> go after the enabled repos, rather than everything.  This is the safer
> option.  This is the way it works.

Well, yum is not guessing (if a depsolver started *guessing* stuff we'd 
all have pretty .. um, "interesting" systems at our hands ;), it's 
behaving in a perfectly constant way, but not the way some of us expect. 
And in fact it IS behaving contrary to the documentation:

        yum clean packages
               Eliminate any cached packages from the system.  Note that
               pack ages are not automatically deleted after they are
               downloaded.

The wording "eliminate any cached packages" doesn't leave anything to 
guesswork IMHO.

> Absolutely nobody is stopping you from submitting patches for the
> documentations.  Seth has said nothing wrt to this.  Instead of
> discussing this indefinitely, do something productive?

Well, Seth has spoken on the topic and it seems that people have actually 
found uses for this behavior. I'll update the manpage to refer to the fact 
that the clean operations only operate on enabled repositories, end of 
story, ok? Before this thread gets any more ridiculous than it already 
is...

 	- Panu -