[Mageia-dev] bug 2317 revisited: --update option should behave like --search-media

AL13N alien at rmail.be
Thu Jun 21 12:35:59 CEST 2012


see https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2317

in short:
I've provided a patch which does this, but there is discussion about it.
Since the patch seems to indicate a change of behavior, people there
requested this be mailed to -dev ML.

so, it's about having new dependencies when you're doing updates and those
dependencies are not in the update media.

The way I see it, there 2 opinions:
A. fetch dependencies only from enabled release/update repositories
Problems:
 - patch doesn't exist yet and code complexity is alot higher
 - if backports are enabled, a dependency fetched from release could
conflict with other installed (from backports or other). thus the update
would fail.

Solutions for this:
 - this is not cleanly solvable, we would have to remove the backport.

B. fetch dependencies only from enabled repositories
Problems:
 - if backports are enabled, dependencies could come from backports
instead of release.

Solutions for this:
 - this can be prevented in various ways: even as simple as the backport
packager to bump an update with stricter requires so that the backport
wouldn't be fetched (_IF_ it indeed would be incompatible) AND the update
could have stricter requires for that new dependency.


IMHO, it's very simple: we should choose B because if you have backports
enabled, you'd want the backport to be pulled for new dependency (IF it
doesn't conflict).

(in the above i state backports, but it could be any enabled repository,
like testing, or even 3rd party repos.)

In short, we shouldn't be thinking of cherrypicking backports, and if
users are trusting repositories, we should be using them.

since QA is waiting for a fix for this for a long time (pre-mga1), we
should get this fixed asap.

PS: since we're enabling backports, we should make sure that the update
validation process would have one of both required tests for validation
with backports enabled and the other disabled.


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