okay, thank you, panu. i did indeed try 'yum clean all' and this worked: apparently you were exactly correct: yum had been caching old stuff (even though i was recreating the repodata each time i rebuilt). this explained why rpm worked now with the dependency taken out but yum did not. cleaning the cache was just what the doctor ordered. also see my post in response to sandra. i just used 'AutoReq: no' in the php.spec file to 'remove' the dependency. however, this is just a kludge, since (as has been pointed out by jim perrin) my php-interbase will not require that you actually do have the drivers (libgds.so) actually installed, and this could potentially mean you crash the php or even the httpd when you make an interbase call through php code, but the interbase driver is not actually loaded. but this does at least let yum (and rpm) work, and since i am only distributing (via yum repository) locally (in-house), we know that we have installed the Borland/Interbase tarball. sure would be nice if they distributed an rpm (as they did before, but that rpm was broken, too, since it didn't say that it provided 'libgds.so', even though it did supply libgds.so.0 and symlinked libgds.so to it). thanks to sandra, panu, jim, michael, peter, hans-peter, ignacio for patiently reading through all my questions and taking the time to respond with your knowledge. even though the "solution" is not perfect, at least i (and hopefully others) feel like i at least know what is going on, now. many thanks to you all. jeff stern
