Pacman

Historical bug tracker for the Pacman package manager.

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https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman/-/issues

This tracker remains open for interaction with historical bugs during the transition period. Any new bugs reports will be closed without further action.
Tasklist

FS#27553 - [pacman] Warning when using both -Syu and --asdeps/--asexplicit together

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Joan Rieu (Fififox) - Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 17:48 GMT
Last edited by Allan McRae (Allan) - Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 23:28 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Output
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 3.5.4
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Summary and Info:

Pacman should output a warning when an upgrade is requested and the flag --asdeps/--asexplicit is given on the command line.
There is no obious use to a system upgrade making all updated packages dependencies or explicitly installed.
Pacman not showing a warning is dangerous for users upgrading their system and installing new packages as dependencies at the same time. (i.e. pacman -Syu --asdeps somepackage, instead of pacman -Sy --asdeps somepackage).

Steps to Reproduce:
WARNING: Do not let pacman do it or you'll lose an hour fixing up the mess!

pacman -Syu --asdeps (can most of the time be recovered using pacman -Qdt)
or
pacman -Syu --asexplicit (will make every upgraded package an "explicitely installed" one, which is worse, but less likely to be run as --asexplicit has no real use with -S)
This task depends upon

Closed by  Allan McRae (Allan)
Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 23:28 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Comment by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 18:05 GMT
I'm quite confused here- how can you possibly do this without knowing exactly what you did and typed? There is a reason --asdeps and --asexplicit have no shortopt form- so you know exactly what you are doing when you specify them.
Comment by Joan Rieu (Fififox) - Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 18:25 GMT
Of course, but when you're used to typing pacman -Syu, you easily forget to remove the 'u' the only time in the year where you use --asdeps. I didn't say pacman behaves the wrong way, but I'm sure that adding a little warning isn't hard and it could save a lot of trouble. I'm sure that running "pacman -Syu --asexplicit" would be the worst thing to do on a system that gets updated once a month (it's not likely to happen, of course). What I faced was that I needed pacman to install a few things as dependencies and inadvertently did -Syu, which caused around 20 packages to be set as "dependencies" such as my graphics card driver which I do obviously need. Thanks to -Qdt I have been able to restore the correct dependencies, but a little warning would prevent any trouble. I'm pretty confident that nobody will ever want "pacman -Syu --asexplicit/--asdeps" to do what it does: there's 99% chance that person made a typo (putting 'u') and therefore I feel that a warning is needed (at least, it would be appreciable).
Comment by Dave Reisner (falconindy) - Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 18:29 GMT
I don't see anything that needs to be changed here. Either you knew what you typed and confirmed it anyways (as you point out there's a prompt to make sure you want to do what you typed), or it was done behind your back by some unsupported pacman wrapper.
Comment by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 18:44 GMT
Quite frankly, this is user error and we aren't in the position to tell you how to use your system or commands on it. If there are pacman flags that don't work together and produce indeterminate state or results, that is one thing, but typing `pacman -Syu --asdeps` is about as clear-cut as it gets.
Comment by Joan Rieu (Fififox) - Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 19:03 GMT
Ok, then feel free to close this if you think it's rare enough and/or stupid enough. I honestly hesitated posting the feature request, so I don't mind you closing it. I just thought it wouldn't take much effort to do it, and it couldn't hurt doing it, as it's a clear user mistake... Have a nice day ! ;D

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