chocolatey
No warning for broken packages
Package libreoffice-still has been broken for some time. I recently had a discussion with its maintainer, but his attitude has disappointed me. I also reported it to the Chocolatey admin, but his response was also disappointing. It is a sorry state indeed. This is the package URL:
https://chocolatey.org/packages/libreoffice-still
Anyway, the Chocolatey admin meant that the package is flagged with a red dot. This is of course not sufficient by any means. In any case, I wanted to report that the Chocolately GUI shows no warning at all.
Therefore, packages that are known to be broken will consistently fail to install without any kind of warning beforehand.
I actually have no hope left. But I still believe that this issue should be mentioned somewhere.
@rdiez said... I recently had a discussion with its maintainer, but his attitude has disappointed me.
Where did this discussion take place? Do you have a link?
When attempting the installation of the libreoffice-still package, you can see the following output from Chocolatey:
That output is driven by the red dot that you can see on the site.
You can also get this information from the choco info command:
And also from the choco list command:
So, I "think" we could get this information in Chocolatey GUI in a way that won't negatively impact on performance of the application.
Where would you see this information going?
As a red dot column on the list view? Added as a red dot in the tile view? Added as a red dot in the package details page?
The (short) discussion we had is on the libreoffice-still package page, the link is in my first comment above.
I do not really mind how you present this information on the GUI. My primary concern is about packages that are known to be broken. This warning should be presented in a way so that non-expert users understand that it will fail, so that they should skip the package. In fact, you may argue that such packages should be filtered out by default.
By the way, I normally tell non-expert users to start the GUI and click on the "update all" button. If a package like libreoffice-still (Inkscape is broken like this too) is known to fail, the GUI should say so in a way that the user easily understands. Reading the verbose text output is a barrier for many people.
Synaptic on Linux has the concept of "broken packages". Maybe the list of installed packages should display such packages in red (or with some other indication), so that the user remembers which one it was, and can choose to uninstall or reinstall it manually. You may also argue that keeping outdated versions actually defeats the purpose of using Chocolatey. But at least some visual indication would be nice, so that I know which package failed last time. This would be extra nice, because, at the moment, each failed package pauses the "update all" procedure.
The GUI could even warn upfront that some packages will fail to update.