On 01/29/2015 01:00 PM, Martti Kühne wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 12:15 PM, Martti Kühne <mysatyre@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> You could also write a pacman wrapper that interferes with pacman's
>> execution upon specific output.
(Doesn't scale to more than one user since nobody else is going to be
using that script.)
>> Then you could have loud warning signals, send emails that get you
>> fired and an automatic backup to the NSA, or NAS, as you like.
>>
>
>
> To correct myself: It's silly to assume the package that breaks your
> setup is already on that watchlist. There's only one thing you can do:
> make sure you have the time to clean up after your update.
>
Uh, there's a difference between
a) We *know* that upgrade X will break your system and/or
require manual intervention.
and
b) We have no specific knowledge that upgrade X will
break your system and/or require manual intervention.
This was clearly a case of the former and not the latter. The risk
tradeoff between doing an upgrade when you know you're in case a) vs.
case b) is also drastically different -- though, yes, would could always
end up with a broken system even in situation b). I don't see how pacman
warning the user explicitly that they're in siutation a) is somehow a
huge problem.
AFAICT it has also been the practice to post notices at least on
archlinux.org for all the breaking updates that that were known of ahead
of time. (Obviously, I can't know if that's actually true of things that
wouldn't have affected my particular set of installed packages, but...)
Georg's request seems eminently sensible to me.
If the problem here is that it would be a chore to do this for
maintainers for every X.Y -> X.(Y+1) upgrade, then maybe Arch package
descriptions could grow a field or flag to handle such things
semi-automatically? Maybe something as simple as "if the version number
is about to change in *this way*, then warn loudly using *this message*".
Regards,
