On Thu, 02 Sep 2010 23:02:53 -0500, "David C. Rankin" <drankinatty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm not knocking Arch, I'm just trying to explore how much work it > would take to make pacman just a little smarter so it avoids some of > these things. That is what I DON'T know. The work it would take is not the only problem. I (and probably other people too) don't want Pacman to be too smart. Because it does only what it must in a conservative manner, I can understand what it does and fix my system if needed. For instance, I had the same problem with Dovecot and I understood immediately what had happened so I changed my configuration file and it didn't crash on reboot. The more things a tool does, the more difficult it is to understand. Aptitude is probably "smarter" than Pacman but I screw my system up a lot more when I use it on Debian than when I use an Arch box. That's the advantage of simplicity: as an operations guy I prefer to run several commands and edit a bunch of configuration files but know perfectly what I've done than run one command that works 99% of the time but doesn't give you a chance to fix the system when it screws up. -- Pierre 'catwell' Chapuis
