On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 12:50:03PM +0100, Dag Wieers wrote: > With smart you can decide what repositories you trust to be > upgrading your system by default, which ones cannot override core > packages and even which repositories are prefered on a per package > basis. In theory you could do that with apt, too, but there were bugs or at least the documenation was not in sync with the code (meaning the code did behave differently than the docs specified). In general having such a system is not a bad idea. Of course long term the reasons for prioritizing repos should be examined and fixed. OTOH we know that some issues with repos not being compatible to users by definition have been attacked quite often in the last 1 1/2 year and still were not resolved. So there is definitely a need for such a system. There will be bugs in using prioritized repo structure, such as A requiring a fixed package B, which is forbidden to be upgraded by smart/apt due to priority rules. In order to overcome such a situation B would have to provide B-feature-X-is-fixed and A depend on this. Currently the assumption is that since A and B are maintained in the same repo, such implicit dependencies/properties are seldomly cast into the specfile. Creating dependencies on specific releases also makes the package less generic and portable. An example would be transcode, which can have a lot of different support in its baggage. smart itself would be another example, which requires a patched up rpm, which ATrpms provides, but from a package POV is indistinguishable from a non-patched rpm (there are no extra Provides). Using smart from ATrpms for say Red Hat 7.3 w/o using the patched up rpm will do no good. The bottom line seems to be, if there will be support from repos for prioritizing schemes, each package need to be considered outside of it own repo context, which is quite hard to do. OTOH it rises the packaging quality of that package, and it will make it cross-repo friendlier will even make it more cross-distro friendly. -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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