#206 exclude some packages from "fink update-all"

[Kevin Horton]

There may be valid reasons why a user may not want to
update some packages to the latest version (e.g. keep
some package at an older version to keep it in sync
with that on another computer, which is not using
Fink). Currently, the only way to do that is to
manually update the other packages by specifying the
names individually. There should be an easy way to
specify a list of packages that should not be updated
during a "fink update-all".

Two syntaxes are proposed:

fink update-all --no-update package_name

fink update-all --no-update-list
file_name_with_list_of_packages

The first syntax would be useful for one-time
operations. The second syntax would be more useful
when there was a relatively permanent list of packages
that should not be updated. The list of packages not
to be updated would reside in a file, with one package
name per line.

[Daniel Macks]

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Neat idea! How mandatory would this --no-update spec be?
That is, consider: foo and bar are out-of-date and the new
foo depends on the new bar, and I "--no-update bar". Is the
--no-u flag a preference that can be over-ridden because the
update-all of foo requires it, or is it a hard block against
updating bar, and therefore foo should remain un-updated?

[Kevin Horton]

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I would work on the principle that if the user has requested
that bar not be updated, fink should respect that, even if
it means that foo cannot be updated either.

In the case where the user has said "--no-update bar", and
this prevents bar from being updated, fink should provide a
very clear message "Package bar is out of date, but it will
not be updated as this would require foo to be updated too,
and foo is marked as --no-update." Fink would update all
other packages, but not foo or bar, while giving the user
enough info to decide what to do.