bad practice: not reading the manpage

[John Thacker]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 10:14:25AM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> I like Michael's idea. "rpm -i" should run chkconfig and do whatever is
> appropriate to enable/disable the service on certain runlevels, that's
> fine and natural. But "rpm -U" should do nothing in that regard.
> After all (I apologize for repeating it over and over again, but I think
> it's a crucial point), whatever the situation before the upgrade, it was
> very likely the result of a decision made and an action carried by the
> human operator. The software should not treat it lightly.

This would violate rpm's behavior as described by the manpage:

     "This upgrades or installs the package currently installed to a newer
      version.  This is the same as install, except all other version(s) of
      the package are removed after the new package is installed."

The current behavior is that "rpm -U" is exactly the same as "rpm -i" if
the package is not currently installed.  (If you want to not install it
if it's not currently installed, then you use "rpm -F".)  I really can't
agree with changing that behavior.

If you mean that it should only be added if it's actually being upgraded,
as opposed to whenever "rpm -U" is run, then I still have the other
objection mentioned in this thread; i.e., chkconfig --del <service>
is quite similar to "rm -f /path/to/file", and you probably don't want
"rpm -U" to not re-add files which were deleted by the operator.
(Although again you might, I suppose.)

John Thacker
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