[indiana-discuss] pkg uninstall without deps

[Jonathan Edwards]

On Dec 10, 2008, at 3:35 PM, Stephen Hahn wrote:

> * Jonathan Edwards <Jonathan.Edwards at sun.com> [2008-12-10 20:28]:
>>
>> On Dec 10, 2008, at 12:14 PM, Shawn Walker wrote:
>>
>>> Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>>>> Shawn Walker wrote:
>>>>> Alexander wrote:
>>>>>> Sometimes I need force uninstall single package.
>>>>>> But in osol I can't do it. May be something like "pkg uninstall
>>>>>> --force" (without deps packages) must be implemented?
>>>>> "forced" install / uninstall is not planned at this time.  For  
>>>>> some
>>>>> reason a "break me" switch doesn't fill me with confidence and
>>>>> joy :-)
>>>>
>>>> I could also use a switch like this, though I prefer to think of it
>>>> as the
>>>> "I know what I'm doing more than you do" switch, even if it was an
>>>> undocumented
>>>> "PKG_PLEASE_LET_ME_HURT_MYSELF" environment variable I had to set.
>>>
>>> The problem is that, inevitably, when you give someone a
>>> "PKG_PLEASE_LET_ME_HURT_MYSELF" they do, and someone else pays their
>>> hospital bill (joking).
>>
>> the problem with not providing this functionality is that determined
>> people will inevitably find a way to do this anyways (eg: rm -rf, dd,
>> etc) and break other things or simply not adopt/adapt
>
>  Alan's articulating a need as a developer; folks trying to  
> configure a
>  system can actually try out lots of destructive operations--that's  
> why
>  we have verify, fix, and snapshots/BEs.  Reinstall as a solution to
>  the developer-testing-new-versions problem is the most promising
>  approach.

sure Stephen .. but understand that i'm not just talking about simply  
"trying out the system" .. not having an equivalent of "--force -- 
nodeps" or
"--clobber" makes me very hesitant to build pkgs that'll have  
dependencies if i'll need to hack around it to get to this  
functionality - it's a bare minimum from a testing perspective  
particularly for a release that's targeting developers.  If we treat  
them all like "they might break their arm if we put that functionality  
in" we're neglecting a large set of cases where this functionality is  
truly needed to work around broken or unnecessary dependency trees -  
and yes, i've dealt with that situation quite frequently.

---
.je