Re: New tool to (quickly) check for available package upgrades

[Marc Espie]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 08:28:02AM -0400, Jeremy O'Brien wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2020, at 21:02, Marc Espie wrote:
> > 
> > The concept you need to understand is snapshot shearing.
> > 
> > A full package snapshot is large enough that it's hard to guarantee that
> > you will have a full snapshot on a mirror at any point in time.
> > 
> > In fact, you will sometimes encounter a mix of two snapshots (not that 
> > often,
> > recently, but still)
> > 
> > Hence, the decision to not have a central index for all packages, but to
> > keep (and trust) the actual meta-info within the packages proper.
> > 
> 
> Sorry, I guess I should've responded to this as well. Isn't snapshot shearing 
> going to be a problem regardless of the existence of a single central-index? 
> For instance, pkg_add notices a chromium update, which requires a newer 
> version of a dependency that hasn't been propagated to the mirror yet.
> 
That's not a big problem, it just stops before updating... at least
your installation doesn't get hosed.