On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 12:04 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote: > On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:23:38 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > > > [...] It would not be beyond reason for Yum to know that certain > > repos work well with each other and others don't, > > That is not feasible. > > Whether repositories are compatible with each other depends on their > contents, not on their repo ids. Users can give repositories arbitrary > names in the yum config files. Should Yum blacklist unknown repositories > by default? Once something has been installed from an unidentified repo, > it may be too late, because the system may have become incompatible with > other packages already. > > Nowhere it is defined which repositories do work with each other. All are > supposed to be compatible with Fedora, because they are built for Fedora. > But there is a serious lack of man-power to ensure that all possible > subsets of repositories work with each other all of the time, too. > > Sometimes they break things accidentally, and that alone can result in > a hard problem for the "naive user" you referred to. Because the > "naive user" doesn't ask for good help. The really "naive user" either > gives up (I've seen some who installed from scratch, avoiding extra > repos like the plague) or use Google to come up with a dangerous or > even malicious work-around like "rpm --force" installs or linking > libraries with different sonames to each other. > > > and to warn the user when conflicts might occur. A plugin perhaps? > > Yum cannot look into the future. > > Normal conflicts, such as explicit "Conflicts:" tags in the packages > and file conflicts found during the RPM transaction check, are fatal > error conditions already. But it is not enough to prevent future > conflicts caused by adding repos. > > Even if Yum ran an expensive repoclosure calculation whenever the > repository configuration changed would not protect from future breakage. Fair enough, but does anyone know if the apt-get system in Ubuntu also suffers from these problems, and if not why not? poc
