I’m very new to opensuse and its package management. I have some questions about zypper. I’ve just installed opensuse 12.3, did a zypper up and installed all those updates, rebooted, added the packman repo via yast and did another zypper up. I now notice that it says some updates cannot be installed:
Should I do a zypper dup from packman or just not worry about it and assume they will update eventually?
I also noticed some odd things when using yast software manager to install stuff. I selected some gstreamer plugins and went to install them and it started downloading which seemed like a bunch of totally extra stuff, like gimp, okular, gtk adwaita engine, gnome branding etc… I cancelled the download and installed the same packages via zypper and it didn’t pull in all that extra stuff, any reason why yast wanted to?
I think that means that you installed from the live KDE media. It is downloading the standard software that did not fit within the 1G limit they set for the live iso. I suggest you repeat that and allow it to continue. And do that before the multi-media changes.
I wonder about the wisdom of totally switching via vendor change to the pacman repo, how well are these files tested out before they are pushed up? Maybe I am just being paranoid.
The link at the bottom of that article points to the one-click website to install the multi-media files but the information on that site is a little strange and slightly confusing.
First it states the following:
This provides a simple wizard to guide you through everything, and you have to install absolutely nothing extra to be good to go!
There is that little thing tacked onto end “vendor change” but it is never explained what that is or how to do it and the one-click method certainly does not do that for you, at least it did not on my system.
Of course I know how to do it but for new people maybe there should be a link there or at least some bold text.
Yes, I’ve also wondered about the switch to Packman, ever since I noticed several KDE packages (pretty basiic ones) that were updated by Packman. I saw no reason for that, so I reversed them back to openSUSE with no issues therefore no need for them to switch. I haven’t used it since. A dist-upgrade (zypper dup) would also switch vendor, which is one reason I do it without Packman enabled. The other reason is to remove complication when testing.
I’ve generally found Packman provides reliable packages, so I don’t see testing as an issue. There are plenty of openSUSE packages that don’t get thoroughly tested functionally. I’m really talking about application packages not included in the default system. There are just too many, and not enough packagers. If the build results are good, and the package loads ok that’s it for the packager. We get to do the functional testing.
