On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Peter Tribble<peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote: > It's essential that the user be able to force an override of the > dependency checking, > during both install and uninstall. There's a whole range of situations where > the > dependencies are incompatible with user intent - either where you have a weak > dependency that you can safely ignore most of the time, or where the > dependency > data is plain wrong, or where the dependency is only required by some > components > of a package which you don't need, or even where the dependencies are so > tangled > that a valid solution is impossible. I'm sure several bugs have been
I worry that after the first --force you are forever stuck with --force for nearly all subsequent package operations. As such fingers and/or aliases are likely to be trained to always use the --force option. When was the last time you did "rm -r" instead of "rm -rf"? There are various types of dependencies[1]. Perhaps the thing that should be be forceable is to change the type of an existing dependency from require to optional. The equivalent of "pkg ... --force" (but probably named --weaken-depends instead of --force) either list or change the dependencies. In doing so it would maintain a list of weakened dependencies so they can be queried or fixed in the future. Such information would probably be in the top three pieces of data gathered during a support call. 1.http://wikis.sun.com/display/IpsBestPractices/Packaging+Best+Practices+-+Dependencies If there are version changes (instead of just removal) needed, then the pkg:/entire incorporation would probably need to be removed. I don't think (but don't know) that this would remove anything, but it would give you the flexibility to dim sum patch[2]. 2.http://blogs.sun.com/barts/entry/rethinking_patching -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
