[13.2] Zypper does not automatically retry on download error – all other package managers do

English Network/Internet
1

Hey,

I’m a newcomer to openSUSE. I’ll skip my reasons for why I choose openSUSE (except someone is particularly interested in that). So here’s my problem:

I am on a pretty stable network (Telekom DE), but when I zypper up, it sometimes happens that the download of a package fails. Completely normal, happens with every package manager. However, apt, yum, pacman etc. usually retry or switch to a different server, whereas zypper prompts for user input. Which is fine, except for (as an example) when you upgrade from 13.1 via dup and let the system download everything while you drink a cup of tea, only to come back hours later and see that zypper stopped at the third package because it prompts for user input instead of automatically retrying. Especially OSB repos (home:abcdef), which, according to my acquired knowledge, openSUSE users need to make use of pretty often because the software in the official repos are limited to base packages, very often fail to download.

Now, I’m not sure if I have been doing things correctly, as my online searches have only brought one or two relevant forum posts, with unstatisfying answers. Only two people of the thousands of SuSE/openSUSE users seem to be annoyed by this behaviour and asked online.

Am I doing something horribly wrong or do all of you guys just accept this (in my opinion) annoying behaviour? Shouldn’t this retry/prompt thing at least be a configurable option in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf?

2

It should but no one has bothered to make a patch for it yet so…

Devs don’t seem to think of it as a high priority issue since it has been like this… err, at least 5 years. Prolly more. Can’t say I remember when I saw a connection error the last time, most likely a long - long time ago.

3

Thanks for your reply.
Do you use the OSB? Would you consider it abnormal that I get connection errors so often? When I was duping I had them approximately 10 times at least.

Is there a place where I could request this feature?

4

I do, however you might be getting redirected to some mirror which is having issues.

You might take a look at; http://mirrors.opensuse.org/

And adjust your addresses to some other mirrors manually and perhaps you’d have better results? Just a random suggestion.

http://fate.opensuse.org

They already have a request or two like that up there but not many people seem to be voting on them… Not sure how active that place is nowadays.

5

Here is a openFATE request for something similar, also this (Ctrl+F: “automatic retry”). Doesn’t seem to be very actively developed though, so I don’t expect this to be fixed anywhere in the near future. Kind of disappointing in my opinion, as these are basic features a package manager should have.

6

But thanks to the openSUSE Download Redirector zypper should automatically detect the best server for me, right?
(I’m unsure about the reliability of that wiki page, as the last edit was in 2011 and the website mirrorbrain.org seems to be down. Edit: Up again, probably a DNS issue on my part.)