Bug 433679

Thanx! I can reproduce the problem. It is because zypper treats the first part of the string until the last colon as an alias of repository from which to install the "Common" (the remainder of the string) package.

There are several ways how to solve this, a few come to my mind:

1) don't expect 'repository:capability' argument if -C is explicitly
   specified, treat the whole string as 'capability'
2) add new option to disable this 'repository:capability' feature 
3) add some argument modifier e.g. '~ccapability' that would make zypper
   treat the string until the end or until another modifier as the capability.
   There could also be modifiers for repoalias, arch,
   e.g. '~rfactory~ai686~npackagename'
   This might even solve bug 404048 (problem how to tell zypper to install
   package with an epoch number - foo-1:1.2.3) and probably other problems!

Suggestions?

I'd prefer 1), i.e. get rid of that repository:capability hack. That's what the '-r' option is for.

(Plus, I'm strongly against option 3. *shudder*)

(In reply to comment #2 from Michael Schroeder)
> I'd prefer 1), i.e. get rid of that repository:capability hack. That's what the
> '-r' option is for.

There are two differences: first, -r puts the rest of your repos (the ones you don't specify) out of play (they can't be used e.g. to satisfy deps), second, you can't specify repo per package with -r.

Uh, ok. Not very intuitive, though. I would have though that '-r' just limits the packages from the command line. What if some package needs a library from the main repo?

Regarding your second argument: what are the use cases for "repo per package"?

Any news on this? AFAIK it's still broken on 11.1 but I would really love to see this back since it makes it much easier to install any needed perl modules.

Regarding how to solve this, IMHO all 3 suggested solutions don't sound really right (especially #3 ;D). Zypper should simply recognize quotation marks (' & ") and treat everything enclosed in them as one string.

That way someting like

zypper in 'perl(Regexp::Common)'

or

zypper in 'some:strange:::repo_alias':'perl(Regexp::Common)'

would be valid. Also it should be possible to simply escape any special characters - like e.g.:

zypper in perl(Regexp\:\:Common)

instead of using quotation marks.

That sounds like the most natural solution to me. Or am I missing something?

As we now have '--from' in zypper, I don't see why we can't get rid of that repository-by-capability hack. Who needs repo per package?

(Uh, the man page says that --from implies --name, why is that the case?)

(In reply to comment #6)
> As we now have '--from' in zypper, I don't see why we can't get rid of that
> repository-by-capability hack. Who needs repo per package?

It was requested in FATE #302919. I agree it's a corner case, maybe nobody used it so far :O)

> (Uh, the man page says that --from implies --name, why is that the case?)

Because of insufficient solver API in libzypp. We'd need and API to install by name/capability while enforcing specific repository. Schubi, could this be provided? This is one of examples of what's needed that i mentioned in http://lists.opensuse.org/zypp-devel/2009-03/msg00012.html - yes, i'll send detailed list later.

I fixed this the easiest possible way for now: if the requested string starts with 'perl(', zypper won't try to parse the string into a repo:packagename. The same if -C option is specified (we can't force repo if installing by capability now anyway).

http://git.opensuse.org/?p=projects/zypp/zypper.git;a=commitdiff;h=4f8ae8ffcf64759808dc20a2775358dec15428f4

We'll deal with this more intelligently later.

Fixed in git repo. To be in zypper 1.2.0 for openSUSE 11.2.

@Sysadmin VBI: do you want this fix also in 11.0 or 11.1?

(In reply to comment #8)

> @Sysadmin VBI: do you want this fix also in 11.0 or 11.1?

It would be really great to see this fix available in 11.0 and 11.1, seeing as they won't EOL for some time now, and we have dozens of servers deployed with those releases. I'm certain other folks would also welcome this fix. 

Thank you!

OK, submitted for 11.0, 11.1 :O)

11.2 (zypper 1.2.0) later.

The fix is on the queue for SLE and openSUSE 11.1 as well.

Update released for: zypper
Products:
openSUSE 11.0 (debug, i386, ppc, x86_64)

Update released for: PackageKit, PackageKit-debuginfo, PackageKit-debugsource, PackageKit-devel, PackageKit-lang, gnome-packagekit, gnome-packagekit-debuginfo, gnome-packagekit-debugsource, gnome-packagekit-lang, libpackagekit-glib10, libpackagekit-glib10-devel, libpackagekit-qt10, libpackagekit-qt10-devel, libqdialogsolver1, libqdialogsolver1-debuginfo, libqdialogsolver1-debugsource, libqdialogsolver1-devel, libsatsolver, libsatsolver-debuginfo, libsatsolver-debugsource, libsatsolver-devel, libzypp, libzypp-debuginfo, libzypp-debugsource, libzypp-devel, perl-satsolver, python-satsolver, ruby-satsolver, satsolver-tools, yast2-pkg-bindings, yast2-pkg-bindings-debuginfo, yast2-pkg-bindings-debugsource, yast2-pkg-bindings-devel-doc, yast2-qt-pkg, yast2-qt-pkg-debuginfo, yast2-qt-pkg-debugsource, zypper, zypper-debuginfo, zypper-debugsource
Products:
openSUSE 11.1 (debug, i586, ppc, x86_64)