Re: Red Carpet 0.9 beta

[Matt Nelson <mnelson dynatec com>]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Ian Peters wrote:

> I understand your points, although I do find your hostility somewhat
> surprising.

I am sorry if I came off as hostile - I commend you guys on your efforts
to make the Linux desktop easy to use and nice to look at. I was just
tired of seeing replies that amounted to "red-carpet is not wrong, your
configuration is".

> Here's the facts, to the best of my understanding.
> 
> Red Carpet is currently very zealous in pursuing dependency problems.
> Anytime tou attempt to complete a transaction, it attempts to resolve
> your entire dependency graph before proceding.  We're looking at
> altering this behaviour for the next release early next week, to only
> resolve those portions of the graph that will be directly altered by
> the requested operations.

This is the correct answer.  I can accept this line of reasoning.  By
saying this you are agreeing that red-carpet is, in fact, lying when it
told me that quake2 had to be removed in order to install gnucash.  It's
lying now, but won't be in a week.  Such is the nature of "beta".

> The fact remains, however, that Red Carpet doesn't tell you to remove
> things unless they have unresolved dependencies.  No matter how many
> words you write in capital letters, it won't change the fact that you

CAPITAL letters are simply a means for placing emphasis.  Not a way to
argue that my system has all its dependencies satisfied.  No matter how
many spelling errors you have, it won't change that fact ;)

> have packages installed on your system which, according to the rpm
> database, don't have their dependencies satisfied.

I never argued otherwise.  I'm sure this is probably the cases.  These
packages may be completely fscked up, but that fact shouldn't (and in fact
*doesn't*) matter one way or another when installing or upgrading
completely unrelated software.

> We're aware of the fact that Red Carpet could tell the user more about
> why their system is broken; we've recieved a number of helpful bug
> reports from users requesting this feature.  Hopefully we'll have
> better explanations in place by 0.9.1.  In the meantime, I suggest you
> figure out why your system has broken dependencies.  The rpm client
> itself, while unwieldy, can help you track this down.  I suggest you
> look into the --requires and --whatprovides options to help you.
> 
> If you are a power user, and if you know that you have installed a
> library or program by hand which is not registered into the RPM
> database, the correct answer is to manually update the database with a
> record describing the software you installed yourself.  I'm sorry this
> isn't as easy as you'd like, but that's what comes along with being a
> power user.

All this is fine, but irrelevant.  My complaint was that what red-carpet
told me was wrong.  Just flat-out, plain wrong.

If red-carpet wants to be helpful and tell me about problems with my
configuration, then GREAT!  I'm all for that.  A tool to help the sysadmin
keep a consistent configuration will be very useful.

Insisting, however, that *all* problems be fixed (by deleting them!)
before upgrading any packages is broken behavior.  You have
basically admitted this, and say that you are fixing it.  Good.

In the meantime, however, red-carpet is useless to me (since I refuse to
delete all those packages, and don't have time to manually fix the
dependencies and/or database), and I won't be able to try it out and
submit real bug reports.  I suspect i'm not alone.

I am looking forward to when red-carpet gets a little further along,
so I'll be able jump in and test it.

Keep up the good work!

-matt

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matthew Nelson
Dynamics Technology, Inc. 
21311 Hawthorne Blvd., Suite 300, Torrance, CA 90503-5610
Voice: (310) 543-5433   FAX: (310) 543-2117   Email: mnelson dynatec com