tsuren's chest of curious packages

[tsuren]

I had this idea for a long time: that is to have a dedicated post for packages that are less known but perhaps useful. I will also give some comments about each applications I packaged for, a short review, as you might say.

The first one is zetapkg (written by infowonder), one of my favourite packages from old days, when I was actually spending a lot of time testing packages. What this application does is very simple. You can take a snapshot of all the packages you have installed in your system, and roll back to the state whenever you wish to roll back (i.e. this will reinstall missing packages and uninstall unwanted ones automatically).

I have modified the original perl script to be able to use this in Salix.

If you are interested in the original discussion on how this came about, and the limitation of the application at the time (which is not the case for its use in Salix, as we have a stable repository ), you can find the link here. There is also a how-to in the original tar file.

zetapkg
zetapkg-0.9.1-noarch-1tt.txz

Edit: I was lucky to install this. I accidentally removed with gslapt xfce and some other key applications inadvertently that uses libglade. And this essentially broke my system, but with zetapkg I got back my old working system.

[Akuna]

That certainly looks like a very powerful and useful tool.

[gapan]

Edit: I was lucky to install this. There is a bug in gslapt (see this post, and please confirm it if in doubt.) And accidentally gslapt removed xfce and some other key applications that uses libglade. (If you are interested, here is how to recreate this problem. :p 1) open your gslapt, 2) select libglade for uninstall 3) before execution,take a look at what packages are to be removed, 4) do not execute, but just cancel, 5) select another application to remove, 6) execute this removal. 7) oh surprise surprise, that packages, that were supposed to be canceled after cancelling the libglade removal, are actually not canceled, and those packages are speedily removed from your machine!) zetapkg got my system back.

That's not a bug. That's exactly how it should work. You marked libglade for removal. So gslapt marked everything that depends on libglade for removal too. You would end up with lots of broken packages if it didn't. And then you only unmarked libglade. If you wanted to unmark everything, you should have done just that.

[tsuren]

That's not a bug. That's exactly how it should work. You marked libglade for removal. So gslapt marked everything that depends on libglade for removal too. You would end up with lots of broken packages if it didn't. And then you only unmarked libglade. If you wanted to unmark everything, you should have done just that.

To be honest, I would call it a bug, as when someone cancels the execution, what he or she would want is to cancel the execution and what might have been added automatically to the list without knowing (or with, actually it does not matter). So what you suggest is after I cancel a execution, I have to re-check what might have been ticked as for removal, and if ticked, untick them one by one? I do not think this is convenient, and probably not intuitive. I agree with you that this is not a flawed programming in itself, but I say its design is flawed.

[gapan]

There is an "Unmark all" option in the menus.

[mimosa]

I can imagine this being confusing, and counterintuitive (now I'm forewarned!) ; but I suppose it's like that to allow you to make apparently perverse selections. The perfect solution might be to have some sort of history of selections, so that in this case, unselecting libglade would bring up a warning about the packages that were automatically selected along with it and ask if you wanted to carry out the action on them too or not, or else choose among them manually. Or something like that. Or just a dialogue box "Unmark all?" whenever you untick something which, if ticked, would entail the automatic inclusion of anything else; then there'd be no need to implement a history.

I imagine you can't do this using slapt-get because it doesn't remember what you delete before pressing enter!

[tsuren]

I think this depends on how you define the action "cancel". For me it means that the execution is cancelled including the selections you made previously, as you would normally proceed to execute after you finish selecting all you want to add and remove. So by clicking "cancel"; unmark all should be called. Besides, if you have to manually select "unmark all" from the menu after canceling anyway, why should not this function be called when you cancel the execution?

I cannot be imaginative enough to think that anyone carefully unticking one by one what is automatically added to the list (except for the ones he or she really wants). I would rather think that the person would "unmark all" and re-tick what he or she wanted to install/remove.

[gapan]

What if you click on Apply all and then changed your mind and wanted to add another package to the list of packages you wanted to install? If everything was unmarked by clicking cancel, would you have to add everything one by one again? Why? After all, you only cancelled the operation, you didn't unmark anything.

What if you want to just install a packages dependencies, but not the package itself? Maybe you want to compile a newer/patched version, but you want to get the dependencies the easiest way. You just mark it for installation, all dependencies are automatically marked and then you just unmark the one you don't want.

[tsuren]

What if you click on Apply all and then changed your mind and wanted to add another package to the list of packages you wanted to install? If everything was unmarked by clicking cancel, would you have to add everything one by one again? Why? After all, you only cancelled the operation, you didn't unmark anything.

For this part, I think it would be far easier in some cases to pick them one by one again (ok, this depends on how many packages). But, at least, there is less risk for inadvertently removing something critical for running the system.

What if you want to just install a packages dependencies, but not the package itself? Maybe you want to compile a newer/patched version, but you want to get the dependencies the easiest way. You just mark it for installation, all dependencies are automatically marked and then you just unmark the one you don't want.

On this point, I agree with you. For this kind of operation, you do not want to unmark all, but it is rather a specific operation. Then again, I would just install the whole thing, and if necessary, remove the package itself.

[gapan]

It is generally a bad design to make assumptions, about anything. If you want to cancel the installation of packages, you do only that. Don't assume that anything else should be done. "Cancel installation" doesn't mean "Cancel installation and unmark everything". If you want to unmark packages, do just that. Don't assume anything else.