Smith, Eric V. wrote:
> When the command has completed, I'd expect everything to be installed
> that I asked it to install, without regard to whether it was already
> intalled. I'm trying to say "whatever it takes, make sure all of these
> packages are installed/updated." Where "whatever it takes" can be
> optionally nothing. But I can see the points you make in a subsequent
> post.
>
> A command line option for this behavior would be fine with me. In the
> meantime, my workaround is just to run yum multiple times.
I don't think it is reasonable to put a myriad of command-line
switches into an app to accommodate for every possible use of the
software. "Feature creep" has been a subject of lots of very lengthy
debates, and the consensus has been that the more "special cases"
there are for a program, the harder it becomes to maintain it,
particularly when a need arises to rewrite significant chunks of code.
Besides, what you ask is counter-intuitive. Consider this yourself:
yum update pkg1 pkg2 pkg3
This is an atomic request for one transaction -- update three
packages. There can be two possible outcomes of this command:
a) Success: all three packages have been updated
b) Failure: neither of the packages have been updated
There is no in-between, because in that case it would no longer be
an atomic transaction. If one of the packages cannot be updated as
requested -- even if it is already the latest version -- the
transaction MUST fail, because it must either produce an exit status
0 (success), or exit status !0 (failure).
So, I would be against both a) changing the default behavior, and b)
providing an extra switch that would break the transaction approach
of yum.
Regards,
--
Konstantin ("Icon") Riabitsev
Duke University Physics Sysadmin
www.phy.duke.edu/~icon/pubkey.asc
