One option smart needs to conquer the world

[Jeff Johnson]

On Feb 22, 2006, at 11:02 AM, Neal Becker wrote:

> When I talk about smart on fedora lists, there is a lot of  
> resistance to the
> idea of a package system that would automatically downgrade  
> packages.  This,
> they say, is not safe.
>


Heh, yum and Fedora FUD.

The proper response is
     How reliable is a dependency solver that does not verify closure  
on already installed dependencies?

For the especially annoying FUD spreaders, ask
     How reliable is a dependency solver that suffers from mirror  
flap, constantly downgrading
     and upgrading its metadata, and attempting different operations  
on each execution?

> What about a configuration option to prevent downgrading, or only  
> allow it by
> manual override?  That should satisfy everyone.


Merely preventing downgrade is not good enough imho. There are  
downgrades and then
there are DOWNGRADES!. One really needs to classify the types of  
downgrades explicitly
(and then of course prevent undesirable downgrades).

hth In case you can't tell, we basically agree ;-)

73 de Jeff