Re: [gentoo-user] nvidia warning comes a tad late

[Philip Webb]

090101 Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Jan 2009 12:27:48 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>>> Don't you think the default action here should be to do nothing
>>> instead of breaking my system?
>> If you tell the system to install a driver, ignore the prompt
>> or even type "y", why are users constantly surprised
>> when the system does exactly what they told it to do?
> Except in this case, portage knew the action was risky
> but issued the warning after the event
> "you really shouldn't have done that", like a typical smartarse.
> There are numerous examples of ebuilds that stop if an upgrade is risky,
> postfix is one such, and provide the user with the an option to carry on
> if they choose, usually be setting an environment variable.
> I really don't see the point in an ebuild making this sort of test
> and then continuing to install anyway.

I agree.  I ran into this on my back-up box which has an older card,
but as I never do 'emerge world' without '-pv', I saw it in time
& aborted via '^c'.  I've now made a prominent note in my pkg list
for that machine not to try to upgrade the Nvidia driver.

Portage knows that what is proposed is going to break the user's system,
so it should refuse to do it.  It's like "Package A blocks package B",
which causes the emerge to stop till the user acts more sensibly.

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