Question about locking packages

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> "We" is the Linux-Department of the University Erlangen-Nürnberg. We 
> have changed almost all servers and clients to smart running SLES9, 
> SLES10, OpenSuSE 10.0 and openSuSE 10.1.

Nice!  How many servers are you currently managing there?

> "When you lock a package you're asking Smart not to allow these packages 
> to be changed. If you want to change these packages all you have to do 
> is unlocking them"
> 
> Jop, thats right and thats what we need because we want to lock the 
> kernel and than install the kernel in a scheduled order through cfengine.

Ah, cfengine. It has a quite interesting concept.

> The "soft lock" idea is exactly what we need. If a package is softlocked 
> than the upgrade process simply writes out the problem at the end and 
> will not upgrade all the packages. (Like apt: Kept back: 1) We automated 
> all the smart-stuff an get Emails for every host with their update-status.

Humm.. isn't that what locks currently do?  If that's the behavior you
want, soft locks the way I was thinking wouldn't help. Perhaps you're
looking for a --ignore-locks flag indeed.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net