Antti J. Huhtala wrote: > I've been with Fedora since Fedora Core 4 (in June 2005), and have seen > it gradually evolve to a more stable, glitch-free OS. It isn't 'there' > yet, and perhaps it will never be. > A few months ago (Nov 2006) one of my (almost daily) updates of FC6 > resulted in a conflict btw. two versions of some graphics program (I > forget which). Because this was hampering updates, I decided to 'yum > remove' the offending version. > Yes, yum gave me a long list of dependencies and asked if it was OK to > remove them as well. Whether I was tired or whatever, I didn't look at > the list closely enough, just gave my OK for the removal. > While this removal was in progress, I saw that files were deleted, files > that I couldn't or shouldn't lose at any cost. X server was one of them, > but it was too late then. > Of course, the OS and all my personal files remained, and I could access > them in text mode. However, I'm not a purist and prefer to work using > GUIs. > I tried to reinstall X server and both Gnome and KDE desktops using 'yum > groupinstall' command in an appropriate manner (please believe this) but > yum started behaving erratically printing gibberish on the terminal > window at some phase of the process. In short, yum groupinstall couldn't > be used. > To make a long story short, I burned my home folder on a DVD and > reinstalled FC6. > If this can happen to me, it can happen to almost anyone. I for one > wouldn't feel insulted if 'yum remove' asked me "Do you really want to > delete these important 'XYZ' files?" Please insult me all you want. In > fact, I think that M$ does this better, however else I despise most of > their policies and stupid user interface error messages. > It shouldn't be too hard to implement an OS version where ordinary Linux > users were frequently asked "Are you sure?" - and include an 'expert > mode' without such questions or error messages for those who never make > mistakes. > IMHO, this would be a step in the right direction - if Linux is to gain > wider acceptance among the masses. OTOH, if Linux is desired to remain > in the hands of selected few, no change to the present is necessary. > Would an "Are You Sure?" message have made any difference? My experience has been that they are no more effective then presenting the list of packages that have to be removed. They have been so overused in the past that people don't read them, they just click OK and go on. They can also be harmful when you get people counting on that type of message to protect them, and get burned when they do something that no one thought to protect them from. I think a better way to handle this would be improve the handling of package conflicts so that you can change the version of a package and its dependencies without having a mess like this. I think SMART handles this a bit better then YUM. But I believe you can do it in yumex, where you mark one package for removal and the other for install. Now, if we could prevent prevent these conflicts in the first place, that would be even better. I believe that most of the time conflicts like this come from mixing repos that are not completely compatible. But fixing that requires changing some laws so that special repos are not required common packages, and can be dedicated ot more specialized packages that are not currently available in RPM format. In the long run, I think everyone would be better served by fixing the problems that underlie this, instead of warning messages that will probably be ignored. If you can not restore X using something like "yum groupinstall X", then that needs to be fixed. If there is a conflict when upgrading to package foo from repo A because it conflicts with files from package bar from repo B, that should be fixed. If you can not change from package foo to package bar without uninstalling and then reinstalling X, then that definitely needs to be fixed. Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
