smart package mgr question?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sun, 2006-10-01 at 11:31 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Axel Thimm wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 01, 2006 at 01:14:35AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >> Gene Heskett wrote:
> >>> I just ran smart pkg mgr on my FC5 lappy, and any cups I click on claims 
> >>> it will downgrade 3 packages if I exec it.  What the heck?  Yumex doesn't 
> >>> seem to have that problem.
> > 
> > Are you perhaps clicking on old packages? If you have foo-1.2.3 and
> > foo-devel-1.2.3 installed and you click on foo-devel-1.0.0 it will try
> > to downgrade at least two packages, since you asked smart to do so
> > more or less explicitly.
> > 
> >> Smart uses a different dependency resolving algorithm that offers to 
> >> downgrade packages automatically. RPM is not designed for downgrades
> > 
> > One of the core features of rpm from the very beginning was to
> > downgrades and uninstalls so the user is able to revert from a bad
> > package. So rpm does indeed support downgrades by design. It does have
> > a safety pin installed in that you need to use --oldpackage so novice
> > users don't accidentially downgrade stuff while thinking they are
> > upgrading it.
> 
> Except that there is no proper way to revert back changes that is done 
> through install scripts or triggers and what not. There is also the 
> thing that QA is never done on downgrades.

True, but ... the classical situation when apt/smart try to downgrade is
resolving broken package deps inside of an installed system.
apt and smart diagnose them and try to resolve them (by downgrading),
yum doesn't diagnose these problems and lets users believe "everything
is OK", while it actually isn't.

I.e. the fact yum doesn't complain, doesn't mean it is right.

Ralf