Jason Stubbs posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Tue, 06 Sep 2005 08:39:32 +0900:
> On Tuesday 06 September 2005 01:06, Philip Webb wrote: >> 050905 Jason Stubbs wrote: >> > it's possible that unmerging slotted packages of the one key >> > may break your system. How's about not warning >> > if there's more than one installed cat/pkg (rather than cat/pkg-ver) >> > satisfying the profile atom that is being triggered? >> >> -- patch snipped -- >> >> I'ld say that the behaviour should be left alone >> pending a larger rewrite of Portage's handling of this kind of thing. >> Meanwhile, simply amend the warning to read in red letters eg > > Why? > >> "WARNING : removing this package may break your system !! >> Have you checked that you have a proper alternative installed ?? >> If you are not certain what you are doing, please STOP NOW !! >> >> Do you want to proceed (NO/yes) ? " > > No. Expanding slightly, since no reasons were given. Portage is normally non-interactive. The only way the above would work would be if it were somehow keyed into the "ask" parameter, and then, it would need to be run before any dependencies were handled, a rather less than workable possibility at this point (when merging anyway, tho this particular thing is unmerging). Currently, the only way to handle this sort of thing is with a time-delay/beep warning, or by up and dying, in /extreme/ cases, with a message like *THIS WILL BREAK YOUR SYSTEM UNLESS YOU DO THIS AND THIS FIRST!* Do that, and set environmental variable WONT_BREAK_SYSTEM_NOW=DOIT, to merge the package. That only works AFTER dependencies may have been merged, so it's not optimal, either, but in a very few extreme cases, that's the sort of solution that has been used. Supposedly, portage is to be a bit better at handling this sort of thing, in a future version, when it will be able to do it before merging dependencies. However, until then, choices are somewhat limited. IMO, a warning about system profile stuff SHOULD sound appropriately drastic. Once the admin is confident that it's doable without issue, then they can go ahead, and if their confidence was misplaced, then it's their issue. The only remaining thing then, is to put enough info into the warning to let the admin take the appropriate action. Pointing out the virtual it's affecting seems like enough info to me. If that's not enough for some folks, perhaps they'd be better off keeping it around, just in case. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman in http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
