starting Fedora Server SIG

James Antill james at fedoraproject.org
Fri Nov 14 15:31:13 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 17:04 +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> writes:
> 
> >> Maybe 'yum' should be fixed to handle ambiguous situations better?
> >> E.g. fail, warn and/or prompt when multiple packages satisfy a (virtual)
> >> dependency?
> >>
> >
> > why did you put yum in quotes?
> 
> I put product names usually into quotes.
>
> > If we don't have a good default course of action, why do you think the
> > user is going to know better?
> 
> Why do you think, that 'yum' knows which choice is the best one? E.g. the
> 'plymouth' case shows that the wrong decision was taken and that the user
> would have made the right one.

 You mean an extremely well informed user might have made the better
choice. I'm not sure _I_ would have, I guess if I had the package
summaries I could work out what -solar was by reading what
-text-and-details-only did and assuming it was the opposite.

 But other problems we have in this space like "install java-devel" are
pretty much guaranteed to confuse the user unless they really know what
they are doing, and have almost universally correct answers.

> > If we do have a good default course of action, why are we prompting
> > the user?
> 
> How do you define/configure a "good default course"?

 I've recently posted a patch to the yum ML which would allow Fedora (or
any active repo.) to configure these choices manually. We could then
also easily have different defaults for the desktop vs. the server
spins.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora




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