One option smart needs to conquer the world

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> > Modifying a schema upgrade on package upgrade is what is wrong (imho).
> 
> I agree in the general case. But, our package is not for public
> consumption.  Smart's dowgrade feature has never caused us a problem,
> but we have safe guards in place, always due testing and don't
> automate the upgrades.

That's precisely what I think.  Distribution packagers shouldn't be
worried about Smart downgrading things, they should be worried about
packaging software correctly, in a way that will never make Smart
downgrade a single package.

> What usually bothers me, and I suppose that this is a separate issue:
> - When I do "smart upgrade", I absolutely hate it when it decides it
> wants to remove certain packages. I would feel the same way if it
> wanted to downgrade certain packages, though that hasn't happened.
> 
> For instance, if performing 'smart upgrade' upgrades KDE, but remove
> or downgrades something equally important to me, such as Firefox, then
> smart is not really doing what I want.
> 
> So, in this case, what I want is 'upgrade everything that can be, but
> don't remove anything or downgrade anything'. While smart's current
> behavior makes sense a lot of the times, if a user can't express the
> kind of behavior  the user wants to see, then the user will not be
> satisfied.

That's a problem we can try hard to fix, and I agree that we need an
operation that will upgrade packages without removing any is needed.
That's trivial to implement, and useful, I agree.  But one should also
understand that satisfying everyone is a hopeless task.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net