launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 05:02:03PM +1200, Robert Collins wrote:
> FWIW from a  quick non scientific glance at other charms in the repo I
> don't see --force-yes. Just -y.
> 
> I agree that the VM is useless if it doesn't do what you need.
> 
> The question is: will --force-anything, get you what you need when its
> invoked? Or will something-else surprisingly break? The behaviour of
> failing early might be more useful.

Over and above -y, --force-yes does the following:

 * Allow installation of unauthenticated packages.  (If you need this,
   you should use --allow-unauthenticated instead, which is narrower.)
 * Force upgrading of held packages.
 * Force downgrading packages.
 * Force removal of essential packages.

I have a hard time seeing how you'd ever have held packages or packages
that need downgrading (though if it is actually realistically possible
and not just a theoretical edge case then I suppose that might justify
using --force-yes), and removing essential packages is an actively
harmful thing that could easily cause hard-to-diagnose failures later.

-- 
Colin Watson                                    [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]