question on "smart upgrade --dump"

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> Hmmmm.... what I still do not understand is the difference between smart 
> install and smart upgrade.

One will find the best possible option for installing a single
package. The other will try to install several packages you haven't
asked for explicitly, trying to upgrade your system, considering
your settings.

> When smart considers different settings, this is only when I do a smart 
> upgrade and not a smart install?

Yes, it considers, but these commands do different things.

> As I tried to say: when I do a "smart upgrade --dump", I get the list of 
> packages that need to be upgraded. When I take the output list and put it 
> after a "smart install", only those packages are installed, without the 
> need tzo downgrade or remove any other package. Maybe there's an additional 
> package to be installed because of a new dependency, but that's all.

As I said, this list is incorrect. Please ignore it for now.

> By seeing that "smart install [package list]" does its job fine, I think 
> it's not an error of the --dump option, but of the calculation for "smart 
> upgrade" ;-)

No, it's not. The list of packages is incomplete. If you have a package
A-1.0 with priority 1000, and a package A-2.0 with priority 0 installed,
Smart *will* try to install A-1.0 on an upgrade, and installing this
package may mean removing others.

> Yes, I understand this. But what is the difference between the candidate 
> state computed with "smart install" and "smart upgrade", when I tell smart 

One tries to install the package, the other tries to upgrade the system.

> to install exactly those packages that are shown with "smart upgrade 
> --dump"?

As I said, this list is incorrect. Please ignore it for now.

You don't have to use --dump to see that behavior. Ask Smart to
upgade your system. Pick a single package out of the "Upgrading" list,
and try to install it. There's a chance that no other packages will
be introduced in the transaction. One might then say "See? I was able
to pick a single package and not do anything else!".  So what?

> And, best of all: I use smart in the most up to date version on my
> offive PC (that's where I am now) running SUSE 10.0 x86_64, on my home
> PC (SUSE 10.1) and on my laptop (openSUSE 10.2). I notice the
> different behaviour of "smart upgrade" and "smart install" only on my
> office PC...

I really miss what mean here. "upgrade" and "install" are radically
different commands. To get the same behavior on "install" you must
pick *every* package being suggested for installation in the upgrade
command.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net