On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 10:37:05PM +0100, jakuai wrote:
> Some things that I really hate about the Mandrake Software manager:
There are things I don't like, too, but MandrakeUpdate is one of the
reasons I recommend Mandrake Linux to people new to Linux. I like it
a lot.
There *are* bugs, and places it could be improved... some of them jakuai
(gust) pointed out:
> * When downloading a hdlist or synthesis, it doesn't provide any
> feedback about the progress.
Yes. Sometimes it *does* deadlock, e.g. if urpm dies, and there's
still a process with the database locked. It's got better at reporting
that, though.
And I have also sometimes found that there's an error dialogue on a 2nd
desktop, when I only have 1 desktop configured -- if I reconfigure
sawfish (gnome) to have 2 desktops, I then see the dialogue and can
click OK! Usually that's if there are hundreds of file conflicts,
though, not downloading the hdlist files.
I usually run MandrakeUpdate in a shell window now so as to see what
it's doing.
> * There are no package descriptions in the synthesis files.
I agree that's a problem. I assume it will be fixed!
> * It often fails to upgrade.
I think "sometimes" is a better word :-) but I usually do only 2 or 3
RPMs at a time. Recently I did 211 RPMs, and there were 3 errors; that
meant that none f the RPMs were installed, so I went into /var/cache,
did rpm -Uvh *.rpm, and moved the troublesome RPMs into a subdirectory
until the upgrade work. Most often it seems to be nautilus and/or
libpng3 that's the problem of late.
"Some of the packages were not installed correctly" should really
say, "the following packages were not installed correctly [see details]".
If there is a failed dependency,
sock1-3.2mck needs ankle1 >= 0.3
it would be nice to be asked,
try to install ankle1-9.3 now?
It's not clear to me why this situation occurs -- the dependency checking
done when asking about additional packages ought to catch this case, but
maybe there's not enough informaiton in the hdlist & rpm db to check??
After a failed install, the packages I tries to install are still
selected in the list on the left, but are not in the list of pending
packages on the right. Clicking on them three times fixes this.
The file size to download goes wrong too. Sometimes packages that
were not installed vanish from the list on the left, and you have
to Reload Lists to get them back.
I recently discovered you can double-click on a package in the pending
list to remove it; a checkbox there would be nicer.
the Reload Lists now reloads all lists, no matter which ones you ask
for (I found this out because the security list at stealth.net made
MandrakeUpdate dump core, so I had to delete the source).
Overall, I like MandrakeUpdate a lot -- I think that the installer
should mention it to people, too, so they don't end up using pmfind.net
or doing web searches to install packages, or compiling from source,
just 'cos they don't know about it. A Mandrake tip-of-the-day in
the gnome and kde packages might help too :-)
Sorry for a rambling message -- I can report individual bugs with
MandrakeUpdate, but I wanted to say I liked it, and to give an overall
description of the (relatively minor) problems I have with it.
Liam
--
Liam Quin - XML Core staff contact, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001
