Bug 954117

According to the Changelog of the package libyui-qt-pkg, making the change not persistent is intentional. See entry from June 22th at
https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/openSUSE:Factory/libyui-qt-pkg/libyui-qt-pkg.changes?expand=1

I'm checking why solver.allowVendorChange is not honored in the UI, which probably is not intentional.

Looks like in this commit, the reading of solver.allowVendorChange was deleted. Looks like a bug to me.

https://github.com/libyui/libyui-qt-pkg/commit/fc38b5083c9bfa723adb9e3f4dcddb7043b

The ncurses interface does not honor the setting in solver.allowVendorChange. After the mentioned commit, the Qt interface also ignores it. So from some point of view, the commit addressed the original issue (inconsistent behavior between both interfaces)... but in the wrong direction. :-)

The real solution would be fixing BOTH ncurses and qt interfaces to read the value of "allow vendor change" on startup from /etc/zypp. But changes in YaST UI (both ncurses and Qt) will remain non-persistent.

More details about behavior on openSUSE 13.2:
- I did not tested if setting solver.allowVendorChange = true in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf is reflected in yast UI (and I do not have openSUSE 13.2 now to test).
- "Allow Vendor Change" in both "Online Update" and "Software Management" modules, is persistent but independent (each module has its own setting)

My opinion/suggestion from user/usability point of view: regardless of UI (ncurses, gtk, qt) and module ("Online Update" or "Software Management") there should be only one setting (solver.allowVendorChange = true/false in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf). This setting should be read/write (persistent) from all above components.
Making the setting not persistent will force users to edit zypp.conf in terminal (and if we want to "convert" Windows users we should be able to do more things that can be done in terminal also from GUI).

I failed to find out why:

- made "Cleanup when deleting packages" and "Allow vendor change"
    not persistent.

Not knowing that "Allow vendor change" can be set in zypp.conf, false is the
safe default.

"Cleanup when deleting packages" has also entry in zypp.conf, but it's even
more dangerous. Both options are marked as for "experts only".

Martin, do you remember where we documented our decision to make these
two not persistent?

In general: it shouldn't be necessary to set the "Allow vendor change" option to true for an (tumbleweed) update.

For explanation why we changed the behaviour not to save the options "Allow Vendor Change" and "Cleanup when deleting packages", see bnc #948134, comment #9.

I have checked the behaviour on Tumbleweed 20151014. Setting solver.allowVendorChange in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf is respected in YaST ncurses package selector (see screenshot) but AFAICS doesn't work in Qt UI.

Created attachment 655312 [details]
Text mode package selector

If you want to follow Tumbleweed you can use 'zypper dup', means do a distribution upgrade. For an upgrade, either YaST Upgrade or 'zypper dup', its by default allowed to change the vendor, the architecture, downgrade package versions....
New options are added to /etc/zypp/zypp.conf which only concern the upgrade (dupAllow...). To have the possibility to protect e.g. packages from an external repository during an upgrade you can change the behaviour with these options, 
see https://discourse.nordisch.org/t/living-on-tumbleweed/379.

Comment 5:
> I failed to find out why:
> - made "Cleanup when deleting packages" and
>   "Allow vendor change" not persistent.

Basically, Gabi and Michael Andres discussed the flags and said we should not store these two flags. And I was a bit too quick in simply implementing it without asking for the rationale and reviewing it.

I think we should elaborate on this explanation from https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=948134#c9 and give an example of the damage that we are trying to avoid:
"The reason is to prevent unintentional deletion of packages (or installation from a different repository in case of vendor change).
The libzypp default of these options is 'false' and the comments in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf warn that "CHANGING THE DEFAULT IS NOT RECOMMENDED" because of the risk of damage the system."

Could you please check/confirm whether 'zypper dup' works for you (comment#8).

As mentioned in comment#6 for the update case a vendor change is usually not necessary or even unwanted.

The upgrade is handled differently and should work for you when using 'zypper dup' or the YaST Upgrade workflow.

(In reply to Cristian ANITA from comment #4)
> More details about behavior on openSUSE 13.2:
> - I did not tested if setting solver.allowVendorChange = true in
> /etc/zypp/zypp.conf is reflected in yast UI (and I do not have openSUSE 13.2
> now to test).
> - "Allow Vendor Change" in both "Online Update" and "Software Management"
> modules, is persistent but independent (each module has its own setting)
> 
> My opinion/suggestion from user/usability point of view: regardless of UI
> (ncurses, gtk, qt) and module ("Online Update" or "Software Management")
> there should be only one setting (solver.allowVendorChange = true/false in
> /etc/zypp/zypp.conf). This setting should be read/write (persistent) from
> all above components.

The current (Leap42.1/Tumbleweed/SLES12 SP1) behaviour is like this:

- "Online Update" and "Software Management" have/read/write same settings
  (should be like this also on 13.2)

- The Qt and ncurses (text mode) UI respect same config files:
 
  * /etc/sysconfig/yast2 contains options which can be (persistently) set in UIs
    (PKGMGR_AUTO_CHECK, PKGMGR_VERIFY_SYSTEM, PKGMGR_RECOMMENDED)
  
  * /etc/zypp/zypp.conf is read (in textmode UI) to have initial value for
    options "Allow vendor change" and "Cleanup when deleting packages" 
    (Qt UI is fixed now, see below).
    These options can be changed in UIs only for one run. This is intended
    because setting true for vendor change persistently (and possible
    forget about it) might lead to unwanted behaviour that packages from an 
    external repo are overwritten by update packages. Also it's risky to
    delete all depending packages unless explicitly wanted.


The bug-fix for Qt UI to respect the settings 'allowVendorChange' and 'cleandepsOnRemove' from /etc/zypp/zypp.conf will be available with libyui-qt-pkg-2.45.6. 
 
> Making the setting not persistent will force users to edit zypp.conf in
> terminal (and if we want to "convert" Windows users we should be able to do
> more things that can be done in terminal also from GUI).

As mentioned before: for an update it's not necessary to allow a vendor change, for the upgrade case it's allowed by default.

The behaviour for "Allow vendor change" and "Cleanup when deleting packages" options is intended, Qt and text mode YaST (gtk isn't supported any longer) read same config files and libyui-qt-pkg-2.45.6 contains the bug-fix.

Setting status to resolved, please reopen if you see still problems.