Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] if (world file) then {no add to world when update pkg}

[Marius Mauch]

On 12/11/03  Patrick Börjesson wrote:

> I just thought that if portage-ng is to rely on a world file just as
> current portage, then one idea would be to not add the packages you
> update manually with 'emerge -u <package name>' to it.
> There was a thread in gentoo-user today which took up this matter when
> someone asked for a way to update all the packages currently installed
> on his machine. One method is to run 'emerge -Du `qpkg -I -nc`', but
> as someone pointed out, this would add every single package you have
> on your system to your world file (which I guess nobody wants) if you
> didn't supply the --oneshot flag to emerge. I propose that the default
> behaviour for portage-ng would be to check whether the package you're
> trying to update is already installed on the system, else do nothing.
> And if it's installed it shouldn't add the package to world after the
> merging is completed (which it currently does).
> Would there be some negative sides of doing it this way? And if not,
> why is this not default behaviour in current portage?
> Feedback (in all its forms) appreciated.

Maybe it's just me, but I find this logic weird: you basically say that
you care about the versions of all packages, but not their existence.
The qpkg hack is nowhere mentioned in the docs, so it's up to the people
to add the --oneshot parameter if they don't want the packages in their
world file. Also I'd really discourage people from using -u with other
targets than world or system, as in 90% of all cases it's doing more
then they want (updating dependencies even if it's not strictly
necessary).
What I want to say is that the world file lists the packages you care
about and I don't really see the reason why people are interested in
updating packages they don't care about (except for security bugs, but
that is another issue with a different solution).

Marius

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