What about smartpm?

[Tim Fenn]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 01:21:49PM -0500, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 12:29 -0500, Neal Becker wrote:
> > I don't think so.  It's like this:
> > 
> > I want to install appA.  It has depB.
> > 
> > repoA and repoB both have depB.  repoA has appA.
> > 
> > Installing (via yum, smart, or whatever) picks up appA from repoA, and depB
> > from repoB.
> > 
> > Now, repoB updates depB.  No reason it shouldn't.
> > 
> > Now, IIUC, yum gives up on this situation.  It wants to update depB, but
> > appA needs the old version.
> > 
> > IIUC, not only does yum not update depB, but it _stops updating anything
> > completely_.  Your nightly yum upgrade stops until you notice the problem
> > and manually repair it.  (Correct me if I'm wrong here).
> 
> It's because this is a safer behaviour than guessing around various
> errors. You think it's wonderful, but it's far more error-prone than not
> doing anything "automagically" until the problem is actually fixed.
> Working around brokenness is a very slippery path to far graver and more
> obscure brokenness down the line.
> 

Perhaps it was a bad example (I don't think smart will break deps to
perform an upgrade, but I could be wrong).  Some interesting cases
(where indeed both yum and apt fail):

http://zorked.net/smart/doc/README.html#study-cases

Regards,
Tim