On 16 Sep 2008, at 17:50, Matthias Bethke wrote:
on Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 10:26:56PM +0200, you wrote:
Seriously: can someone more skilled than me explain why using
--resume-skipfirst and then trying to solve the unmerged packages
is/can be
a bad idea? How can this break the system?
Frankly I have no idea. I've heard that argument many times in the
Paludis discussions but never even an attempt at an explanation that
went beyond "it breaks your system". My understanding is that you can
have two kinds of situation if an upgrade fails:
...
b) the failed package is a dependency of at least one other package
In case a) you get to keep the old version, no problem.
The risk is that you want to install X that depends upon Y.
The ebuild for X states that version >1.2.3 of Y must be used because
there's a bug in 1.2.2.
The new version of Y fails to compile, so when X is compiled it only
has the old version of Y to work with. It may compile OK but not work
or feature a security bug.
In the ideal world X's ebuild will fail, recognizing that Y is too
old, and I think it will - my explanation may not literally be
correct, but I hope you get the idea.
What should NOT be in dispute is that Portage is a big old mess and
well in need of replacement. It was never designed to do what it does
now. Hopefully the replacement chosen to be integrated into Gentoo
itself will be chosen on its merits, whether that be Paludis or
something else.
Stroller.
