----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Zelený" <jzeleny(a)redhat.com>
To: "Steve Clark" <sclark(a)netwolves.com>
Cc: devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2015 3:15:42 PM
Subject: Re: dnf replacing yum and dnf-yum
On 10. 4. 2015 at 08:56:16, Steve Clark wrote:
> On 04/10/2015 08:40 AM, Jan Zelený wrote:
> > On 10. 4. 2015 at 07:16:30, Steve Clark wrote:
> >> On 04/10/2015 07:04 AM, Jan Zelený wrote:
> >>> On 10. 4. 2015 at 09:34:15, Reindl Harald wrote:
> >>>> Am 10.04.2015 um 09:18 schrieb Jan Zelený:
> >>>>> On 10. 4. 2015 at 08:53:46, Petr Spacek wrote:
> >>>>>> I very much agree with this. As a user, I expect that
'dnf upgrade'
> >>>>>> will
> >>>>>> give me latest packages and that DNF will tell me the fact
that
> >>>>>> newer
> >>>>>> packages are available but not installable.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Maybe it could have a form of plugin, at least for the
beginning?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Again, dnf check-update already does that
> >>>>
> >>>> Again: that argument is pointless because *nobody* is calling it
by
> >>>> hand
> >>>> after "dnf upgrade" and so that information is *not*
available for the
> >>>> regular dnf/yum user
> >>>
> >>> The vision for dnf is to be more simple and more effective tool for
> >>> admins
> >>> that will not try to solve problems of other components. On the other
> >>> hand we want to enable package maintainers and other advanced users to
> >>> achieve their use cases somehow but dnf will never be a debugging
tool.
> >>> Bottom line, we will consider this feature request but considering it
> >>> is
> >>> the only promise I can give you.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks
> >>> Jan
> >>
> >> Mr. Zeleny,
> >>
> >> As an admin and user how does this behavior make it simpler for me? I
> >> now
> >> have to do 2 steps to make sure things worked as expected. How is this
> >> simpler?
> >
> > What we envision is for the admin not to debug the problem himself, it's
> > not his responsibility. Packaging problems should be discovered
> > automatically when an update is created. This is being worked on by
> > Fedora QA IIUIC. Package maintainers are the second line of defense, as
> > they should resolve these problems before updates go stable. But these
> > issues should never get to the end user.
> >
> > Bottom line, if an update is in a repo but it's not installable, it's
> > technically not available to the client as some of the bits are obviously
> > missing. Maybe you could help me understand what value does the
> > information
> > have for you when you can't install the packages anyway.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Jan
>
> Mr. Zeleny,
>
> It is naive, in my opinion, to assume that Fedora is going to supply all
> the
> packages one might need. I quite frequently run into the problem of
> dependencies from other repos clashing with Fedora's, and others and have
> to use the information provided by yum to determine how to clean things up.
> In what is proposed now I will have to do two steps to determine there is a
> problem.
Ok, I think I understand your problem a little better now, even though I
still
maintain the opinion that dnf should not be a debugging tool. I have seen a
few proposals here that have the potential to be a nice compromise.
Also I wonder if dnf check-update is actually useful. From what I've read
here, it seems it's barely used. If dnf is to have its functionality covered
by the upgrade command, perhaps it's possible to remove the check-update
command.
FYI, at first sight, the implementation of "dnf check-update" is almost the same
as "dnf list upgrades" except that "check-update" returns a special
exit code...
--
Radek Holý
Associate Software Engineer
Software Management Team
Red Hat Czech