On Mon, 22 May 2006, Shahms King wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This is related to an earlier message about removing the obsolete and broken arch-specific epydoc package. That specific package has been fixed, but the general problem of old architecture specific packages breaking newer (properly) noarch packages remains. I encountered the problem most recently when trying to install python-reportlab which, like the epydoc package, has both a newer, properly compiled noarch package and a FC3-era i386 package in the repository. And, like epydoc, the old package breaks updating, installing, etc. the new package. Unlike epydoc, the offending python-reportlab package explicitly requires: python < 2.4 and therefore fails to install rather than simply failing to work. I'm not precisely sure where the blame for this lies, but there are certainly a number of candidates: 1. Propagation of packages from old releases to new releases doesn't adequately compare noarch and arch packages. Both of the problem packages I have found are *FC3* packages that have been copied, unchanged, into both FC4 and FC5 despite the existence of newer and properly built noarch packages. 2. Similarly, these packages are not being pruned when newer versions are pushed, rather the old arch-specific packages are sitting in the repository. 3. yum fails to take noarch packages into account on install or update when any arch-specific package exists, regardless of the epoch, version or release. I strongly suspect the problem lies with RPM always comparing an arch-specific package as "newer" than a noarch package, but I'm not certain.
RPM will happily upgrade such a package, it's yum-specific behavior to refuse to change package arch. Set exactarch=0 in yum.conf and it'll upgrade that. The other way around this is renaming the package to something else.
Note that these problems *appear* to have been fixed in rawhide as the extras development repository does not contain the offending packages. Additionally, trying to track down any potential problem packages is difficult as repoquery will not check versioned requires and insists that python-0:2.4..2-3.2.1.i386 provides "python < 2.4", which it most assuredly does not.
Huh, you're saying 'repoquery --provides python' on FC5 says "python < 2.4"? I have hard time figuring out how it would come up with such a thing if it doesn't exist in the package but... Please show me the exact command to reproduce that so I can check what the heck is going on.
Oh and there are such gems around, eg perl has "Provides: perl <= 4:5.8.8" which looks pretty dubious to me.
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