different behavior for RPM dependency handling between yum and apt

[Rick Thomas]

Well... yes (I assume you are referring to "man yum" when you speak 
of documentation) it's documented if by that you mean that "yum 
update" and "yum upgrade" are documented as being different in the 
treatment of obsoleting (one does, and one doesn't) and "upgrade" 
is recommended for going between distributions and "update" is for 
going within distributions.

Maybe I'm slow, but I didn't deduce from that discussion the fact 
that "update" would fail to at least warn me about "obsoletes" not 
being acted upon.

Suggestion: If it's a feature to have "update" ignore obsoletes, 
then it should be a feature to have it warn the user when it does 
so.

My two cents worth...

Rick

PS: Is there a design document for "yum" that I can read?  One 
where issues like these are discussed?

PPS: Presumably, only one of "gated" or "zebra" can be installed at 
one time.  If "yum" only upgrades the installed packages (and 
[optionally] acts only on those packages "obsoletes"), then what's 
the problem?  Only one set of obsoletes will be visible during the 
upgrade.  Am I missing something?


PPPS: "Yum" is a great program.  I'm truly impressed with it.  All 
of this is a very minor issue.  And thanks for the full and 
complete answer to my question.  It's nice to deal with folks who 
care about what the user thinks.


On Friday, July 11, 2003, at 10:05 PM, Konstantin Riabitsev wrote:

> I *am* on the yum design team, and this subject has been mulled 
> over a whole lot back when the problem of gated reinstalling zebra 
> reinstalling gated came out. The result of the deliberations was 
> that:
>
> a) obsoletes are unlikely to happen within a lifetime of a 
> release, so yum should do "update" and ignore obsoletes.
> b) when going to a subsequent release, one should use "yum 
> upgrade" so obsoletes can be resolved and applied.
>
> This is a design feature and is documented.
>