One option smart needs to conquer the world

[Neal Becker]

On Wednesday 22 February 2006 2:33 pm, Zach Garner wrote:
> > That's a crazy world. One of the reasons I wrote Smart was to avoid
> > explosion when merely downgrading a package would fix the transaction.
> > As a user (perhaps a non-conventional one), I always hated having to
> > figure out why the transaction wouldn't work myself.
> >
> > Is that what users want?  Not peforming an operation at all rather than
> > being *ASKED* to downgrade a package?  If that's the case, I'll
> > implement the flag in Smart that disables that support (and perhaps
> > rename the project...).
>
> Maybe I'm being mis-understood. I definitely think this is better. By
> default, downgrade a package if it makes everything else happy.
>
> The other part of my thinking is that, what if I know I don't want to
> downgrade anything, and would prefer to tell smart to upgrade/install
> what it can so long as it doesn't downgrade something else. This comes
> down to "give the user the ability to express what he/she wants"
>
> Primarily, I was just trying to suggest a compromise. If the Fedora
> people are freaking out over the ability of smart to downgrade a
> package, then let them have the option of disabling it. The fedora
> people would still get a better tool, but they have the ability to
> alter the default behavior. To me this is no different than every
> distribution out there customizing the default behaviors of everything
> from KDE to vi to do what they think is best for their users.

Here is a possible compromise:
A config setting that will not downgrade by default, but will warn the user 
that if they allowed downgrade they would get a better result?  This presumes 
that somehow smart could determine that the result would be "better" for some 
definition of "better".