Beware: External repos can break key transition

[Warren Togami]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 16.09.2008 03:24, Warren Togami wrote:
>> BTW, I just thought of a horribly ugly but automatic working solution 
>> to this problem: Filter the require on "xine-lib(plugin-abi) = 1.24" 
>> from that package.
>>
>> This sucks, but at least yum update will upgrade to the latest N-V-R 
>> packages in both repos so this doesn't exactly break anything.
> 
> It breaks for some times: let's say xine-lib (Fedora) and 
> xine-lib-extras-nonfree (Livna) get both pushed to their repos at round 
> about the same time (like it was the case for the recent packages). Then 
> there is a time window that's afaics round about somewhat between 24 and 
> 36 hours long(¹) where yum on the user's system might chose to use the 
> livna master repo (or a up2date livna mirror) and a Fedora mirror that's 
> not up to date.
> 
> Thus yum will install the new xine-lib-extras-nonfree from Livna, but 
> not the matching xine-lib from Fedora. Thus all apps that rely on xine 
> will silently stop playing some videos that they were able to play 
> beforehand. I'd call that breakage ;-) A breakage that IMHO is not 
> acceptable, as users won't know what's up and might file bugs.
> 

You are suggesting that out of sync mirrors causing this software to 
fail as being "unacceptable".  Implicitly this means you suggest it is 
better for the entire update transaction to fail and require manual 
intervention?

The former problem is only temporary and likely to clear itself up, 
while the latter is permanently fatal.

Certainly this suggestion sucks, but is there a better way?

Warren