Description of problem: there are aliases that remove/erase and distribution-sync/distro-sync and one of them should be dropped going forward to avoid confusion. this pops up often enough in user mailing list and other forums. users repeatedly have the notion that erase and remove are somehow different. an old thread for reference https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2010-June/376013.html note however that in the case of dnf, erase seems preferred however remove is far far more popular as a quick google search would show. similar for upgrade vs update. so you might want to reverse which one is considered deprecated and gets shown preferably in help/man etc
It is usually a mistake to have aliases in the first place, that is true, and DNF is in the process of removing them. I'll think about a strategy to start displaying deprecation warnings so people can migrate their scripts and learn the only spellings. I'm however going to keep the 'erase' and 'uprade' spellings preferred and deprecate the other ones.
there is a quantitative way to look at this beyond personal preferences: In google searches, yum remove About 9,300,000 results (0.22 seconds) yum erase About 573,000 results (0.21 seconds) yum update About 18,000,000 results (0.42 seconds) yum upgrade About 3,110,000 results (0.27 seconds) Summary: yum update beats yum upgrade yum remove beats yum erase
FWIW, I dont think I even knew yum has an "erase" command, and always use "update" instead of "upgrade". The above figures match my gut feeling of "remove" and "update" being by far the more commonly used variants in 3rd party documentation and mailing list discussions. OTOH "upgrade" does pair better with "downgrade" than the "update" variant.
Right, 'upgrade' resembles 'downgrade'. And rpm itself calls it's '-U' command 'upgrade'. Same for 'erase'. So for those users familiar with RPM it will make more sense. The rest of them will see the deprecation warnings. I am not going to drop 'update' and 'remove' any time soon and I still aim for a high degree of CLI compatibility and this particular case is easy to retain.
Rpm's use of "erase" is the oddball case, practically everything else out there uses the term "remove": apt, dpkg, zypper, urpmi, smartpm... even Windows has "Add/Remove software". I'd suggest keeping "remove" and axing "erase" instead and never mind what rpm itself calls it.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 20 development cycle. Changing version to '20'. More information and reason for this action is here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora20
any update on this?
This is not something considered a problem by wider user base or by the team, closing.
I am not sure you can speak on behalf of the wider user base Ales. There certainly has been a number of threads over the years expressing confusion over aliases - ex: what is the difference between update and upgrade? Before dnf becomes default, I would have expected some amount of cleanup of whatever aliases are deemed deprecated.