What about smartpm?

[Tim Fenn]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 03:21:22PM -0500, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 12:12 -0800, Tim Fenn wrote:
> > > 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
> 
> Yeah, and this is still unsafe, because downgrading is inherently,
> implicitly unsafe.
> 
> 1. You can downgrade into a vulnerability
> 2. Downgrading often breaks, since newer version can do things in %post
> that make downgrading to a workable state impossible
> 

Can I not reverse this argument to state:

Yeah, and this is still unsafe, because upgrading is inherently,
implicitly unsafe.

1. you can upgrade into a vulnerability
2. upgrading often breaks, since newer versions can do things in %pre
that make upgrading to a workable state impossible.

And have it be equally valid?  ;)

Regards,
-Tim