[Mageia-dev] bug 2317 revisited: --update option should behave like --search-media

Thu Jun 21 12:35:59 CEST 2012

see https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2317
+
+in short:
+I've provided a patch which does this, but there is discussion about it.
+Since the patch seems to indicate a change of behavior, people there
+requested this be mailed to -dev ML.
+
+so, it's about having new dependencies when you're doing updates and those
+dependencies are not in the update media.
+
+The way I see it, there 2 opinions:
+A. fetch dependencies only from enabled release/update repositories
+Problems:
+ - patch doesn't exist yet and code complexity is alot higher
+ - if backports are enabled, a dependency fetched from release could
+conflict with other installed (from backports or other). thus the update
+would fail.
+
+Solutions for this:
+ - this is not cleanly solvable, we would have to remove the backport.
+
+B. fetch dependencies only from enabled repositories
+Problems:
+ - if backports are enabled, dependencies could come from backports
+instead of release.
+
+Solutions for this:
+ - this can be prevented in various ways: even as simple as the backport
+packager to bump an update with stricter requires so that the backport
+wouldn't be fetched (_IF_ it indeed would be incompatible) AND the update
+could have stricter requires for that new dependency.
+
+
+IMHO, it's very simple: we should choose B because if you have backports
+enabled, you'd want the backport to be pulled for new dependency (IF it
+doesn't conflict).
+
+(in the above i state backports, but it could be any enabled repository,
+like testing, or even 3rd party repos.)
+
+In short, we shouldn't be thinking of cherrypicking backports, and if
+users are trusting repositories, we should be using them.
+
+since QA is waiting for a fix for this for a long time (pre-mga1), we
+should get this fixed asap.
+
+PS: since we're enabling backports, we should make sure that the update
+validation process would have one of both required tests for validation
+with backports enabled and the other disabled.
+