[issue54] easy dependency upgrades

[Tom at Labix Tracker]

Tom <tpgww at onepost.net> added the comment:

On Mon, 05 Dec 2005 20:41:50 +0000
"Mauricio Teixeira (netmask) at Labix Tracker" <tracker at labix.org> wrote:

> 
> Mauricio Teixeira (netmask) <mteixeira at webset.net> added the comment:
> 
> After you select to upgrade a package, Smart doesn't do any calculations
> on the dependencies. Those calculations occur right when you select
> "Commit", so then you will have a infomation window showing the package
> upgrade itself and the depedencies which need to be upgraded too.
> 
> If it's not what you're talking about, then we're confused and could not
> understand the issue.

There may be various available versions of any dependency for a package. Mandriva (at least?) does not properly upgrade dependant libraries, its policy seems to be not to include library versions in spec files. (Mandriva's suggested approach, in effect to always upgrade _all_ libraries, is totally useless for those of us with limited bandwidth.) A couple of times I've found that successful upgrade of a mandriva package required me to do manual, trial-and-error selection of which dependencies to upgrade.

So when using smart (in gui mode) a scenario is this:
1. find a package that you're interested in (doesn't matter whether installed or not, but in the case that interests me, it is installed).
2. look at that package's dependencies, on the relations tab in the window.
3. allow any such dependency to be selected for installation, in the same way as it could be selected if it were displayed in the upper part of the window. 

This approach avoids having to find that dependant package separately, and then selecting it. Unless you open a second smart instance, iterating back and forth between finding a package and finding its dependencies is quite annoying.

Hope this makes it clearer.

Regards
Tom

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Labix issue tracker <tracker at labix.org>
<http://tracker.labix.org/issue54>
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