On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > Ever since I installed FC3, all my attempts to `yum upgrade' have > failed due to missing dependencies. > > Half of this is down to poor management at the Fedora repositories. > First it was a mysql library missing, now it's some xfce component. > They just can't seem to keep it together over there, and I'm beginning > to get rather fed up about that. What do your /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo's look like? I'm only running one FC3 x86_64 box at the moment, but the main thing I've observed is that the server/repos I'm using are a bit flakier than I'd like and yes, appear to be inconsistent (probably transiently as they are actively updating some file tree). Running the base installation from a local mirror seems to help. So far I have few complaints about FC3 relative to FC2. Some things I use a lot missing, but nothing I can't rebuild if I really want them. mysql itself appears to be installing on my one box as I sit here from "yum install mysql". > The other half of this is yum's problem. Is there any good reason why: > > 1. When you do yum update and dependencies are missing, yum bombs out, > rather than removing dependent packages from the update list > and installing as much as possible. > > 2. --exclude makes no difference to dependency calculations. Even if > I exclude all the packages with missing dependencies by hand, yum > still bombs. > > I'm not one to complain about such things without trying to send a fix > patch, so I checked out yum from CVS and tried to instrument it. Only > to find that when I run bin/yum.py it bombs with an unhelpful message. > > Would you please include in the INSTALL file some description of how > to do test runs from a checked-out CVS copy? In the past the reason for 1 at least that has been given that yum is designed to have "no unexpected side effects". Either it works or it doesn't work atomically, and if it doesn't work you are responsible for figuring out how the fact that it doesn't work alters your plans. For example, suppose you plan to install mysql and a webserver and four other packages to support mysql's integration with the webserver. If the mysql component bombs, you might well NOT want to go ahead with the rest of the install until you've straightened out the issue, especially if there are intertwined dependencies. Installing some of the remaining components on your list might obsolete stuff you already have installed and running, and lacking mysql you "could" end up breaking what you have running without having the components all handy to replace it. Maybe this is ok and what you want to do. Maybe not. You have to make the decision; yum won't make it for you. Similarly, yum has no "force" option and cannot be coerced into leaving your rpm database broken under normal non-buggy operation. I'd guess that this limits the kinds of things it will permit via e.g. exclude options, although I don't use them very often personally. Yum >>will<< be unhappy if you've ever forced things by hand on the system as it relies on the correctness of the rpm db in order to make its dependency decisions. I've very definitely had difficulty with systems that were "upgraded" from e.g. RH9 to FC2, and can imagine that difficulty could also occur on systems "upgraded" from FC2 to FC3. It is always safest to do a clean reinstall for an upgrade, if the system can be rebuilt from a kickstart file plus some restores of the key system files. rgb -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
