[bug-notifications] [pkgutil 0003904]: pkgutil 1.7: --transform doesn't work when package is already installed

[Mantis Bug Tracker]

A NOTE has been added to this issue. 
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http://www.opencsw.org/mantis/view.php?id=3904 
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Reported By:                skayser
Assigned To:                bonivart
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Project:                    pkgutil
Issue ID:                   3904
Category:                   regular use
Reproducibility:            always
Severity:                   minor
Priority:                   normal
Status:                     assigned
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Date Submitted:             2009-09-17 16:39 CEST
Last Modified:              2009-09-23 19:36 CEST
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Summary:                    pkgutil 1.7: --transform doesn't work when package
is already installed
Description: 
Me again. In contrary to the -s/--stream option, --transform seems to check
the requested package against the ones that are already installed and
doesn't proceed if the package is already installed.

skayser @ ray42 ~$ pkgutil --transform wget
You're not root and didn't set -W, using current dir.
Parsing catalog, may take a while...
Current packages: CSWcacertificates-20090108,REV=2009.01.08
CSWcommon-1.4.6,REV=2008.04.28 CSWcswclassutils-1.18,REV=2009.08.10
CSWosslrt-0.9.8,REV=2009.03.27_rev=k CSWwget-1.11.4,REV=2009.04.15
$

The primary usage of --transform for me is to cross-check ongoing
packaging work with other packages. Whether a requested package is already
installed doesn't really matter to me, i just want to have a look at the
full package structure.

IIRC i was in favor of --transform to work as a switch to -d and to have
-d download a package independently of whether it is already installed.
Similar to "aptitude download <pkgname>" on Debian. Did we talk about that?
====================================================================== 

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 (0006746) skayser (administrator) - 2009-09-23 19:36
 http://www.opencsw.org/mantis/view.php?id=3904#c6746 
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Overall, --transform shouldn't behave that much different from -d (just an
additional transform after the package has been downloaded - more a variant
of the -d mode than a mode on its own). So IMHO we should see whether we
can do something about both of them.

Now that -d had skipped locally installed pkgs in the past, i see two
options

1) Add a switch to ignore the installation state of a pkg, so that one can
force the download of all requested pkgs

  pkgutil -d [--transform] --all foobar
  pkgutil -d [--transform] --force foobar
  pkgutil -d [--transform] --?? foobar

Both are not very intuitive (i can't come up with an intuitive one right
now), but should demonstrate what i mean.

2) Break with existing behavior, ignore the INSTALLED state of a pkg, and
introduce an additional switch (could either be for the -d or the -i mode,
see below) which would restore previous behavior. Needs to be noted in the
changelog of course.

I am in favor of option http://www.opencsw.org/mantis/view.php?id=2 for two
reason. First, it is consistent with
the -s behavior which just downloads all pkgs. Second, if i want to
download pkgs, i want to download them. It is not as if i was saying
"pkgutil, please do as if you were installing, but only download". If i
wanted that, i would rather say something like: "pkgutil -i
--download-only".

To draw a comparison with the Debian's aptitude: to download a pkg on
Debian i have two options

 aptitude install -d foobar
 aptitude download foobar

The first one is the installation mode and would download foobar only if
it wasn't installed yet. Feels intuitive, no? One knows that aptitude is in
installation mode, does all the usual, clever logic, but then simply
downloads instead of installing. The second one is the download mode which
simply downloads foobar without honoring any local pkg states. Also feels
intuitive to me (although i somehow like our download behavior of
downloading deps also ;).

In pkgutil we could thus have

 pkgutil -i --download foobar  (or pkgutil -d --skip-installed)
 pkgutil -u --download foobar

^^ Do as if you were installing/upgrading, but stop after the download.

 pkgutil -d foobar

^^ Simply download a package (plus its dependencies?).

Plus variants of the -d mode.

 pkgutil -d --transform foobar
 pkgutil -d --stream foobar

What do you think? Any possible comparisons to how things work with yum on
RHEL?