Re: Why PREFERRED_VERSION setting of <distro>.conf overrules local.conf setting ?

[Denys Dmytriyenko <denis@denix.org>]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 09:14:41AM +0930, Graham Gower wrote:
> On 11 August 2010 06:26, Chris Larson <clarson@kergoth.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Koen Kooi <k.kooi@student.utwente.nl>wrote:
> >> What's the point of setting a preferred version at all if you make it a
> >> weak assignment?
> >> The distro nearly always knows better and if you want to use a different
> >> version, sending a patch to change that version for review isn't exactly
> >> rocket science.
> >
> >
> > How about having decent usability?  The user asking for something and not
> > getting it is completely unintuitive.  If the user doesn't know what they
> > want, they won't request a specific version.  If they do request it, they
> > should get it, anything else is an OE usability issue.
> 
> Precisely. The user shouldn't have to understand the details of
> parsing order, weak assignments, etc. in order to write a local.conf
> which works for them.

Yeah, and then distro maintainers are blamed for the breakage when users unpin 
and change specific dependency for a package.

It's not just the parsing order problem. It's not clear for users that if they 
change anything in local.conf, it can break. I.e. you break it - you fix it.

-- 
Denys