[Techtalk] Fedora 17 yum woes (dupe packages)

[Lisa Kachold]

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On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Lisa Kachold <lisakachold at obnosis.com>wrote:

> Hi Gwen,
>
> Yum or "Yellow Dog Management"  is usually cowardly to the point of
> complete failure rather than proceed with an update loop that results in
> dups.  Using any package management (not just yum itself) interestingly
> enough makes us all timid, perhaps from legacy horror stories and the
> terror that comes from situations like this?
>
> It's usually best practice to include the EXACT error thrown and specific
> versions for the OS and whatever package versions when requesting PLUG
> assistance. It's always good to drop in the output of:  Standard process
> for production work includes a research or documentation phase, wherein the
> 1st four Google pages (and their contextually appropriate links) are
> perused.  In a fast break-fix environment, we develop what might be called
> "Evelyn Wood-ish Geek Speed Reading"' a skill that IS the basis for all
> Unix/Linux success.
>
> But the way you framed your question, any effective answer will, in this
> Linux list server community, "separate the chaff from the wheat", so to
> speak, since more than perfunctory experience with YUM would be essential
> (and those who have failing memory  or who have simply sharply honed their
> speed reading and research skills will be at a disadvantage helping you).
>
> Please see my inline comments below:
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:38 AM, Gwen Morse <gwen.morse at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I hadn't done an update on an older laptop in some time and set it to
>> update. It lost power and the battery ran down, interrupting it.
>>
>> Yum (or the rpm database) now appears broken.
>>
>> When I try to do any further changes or edits I get error messages
>> about duplicate packages. I would expect to just remove the duplicates
>> and reinstall them by hand, but there's several hundred duplicate
>> packages totalling over 3 gigs in disk space, including many that are
>> clearly core files to the OS.
>>
>
> I am sure you actually mean "base" files for the OS, rather than "core
> files" which are certainly another thing entirely, but I am being obtuse.
>
>
> Is this horked up beyond all repair, or is there some hope of fixing
>> it without resorting to a clean install?
>>
>
> NO!  Not horked up in the least!  There is always hope with yum (unlike
> apt-get [but that is another subject])!  And while dups are a common
> experience in YUM updates, many people simply ignore them (most recently
> observed in a Fortune 50 company known for their automation push in 2012).
>  Clearly the 3 gigs in disk space is prohibitive without the advantage
> provided in production environments now leveraging private (HPSA/HPNA/HPOO
> push button cloud provisioning) and public cloud (Amazon EC2) disk and
> distributed virtualization.
>
> Can I remove the older files through rpm or are the newer duplicates
>> not fully installed, yet?
>>
>
> $ yum check duplicates | awk '/is a duplicate/ {print $6}' > /tmp/DUPES
> $ yum remove `cat /tmp/DUPES`
>
> NOTE:  If the correct package to remove was the one installed later,
> changing $6 {to print} $1 might help to remove the right chunk of
> dependencies.  So I suggest you use each and compare AWK's output.
>
> *Of course, before you remove the dupes, make sure to examine the tmp
> file (/tmp/DUPES) for accuracy.  You can post DUPES somewhere (tinyurl)
> denoting the URL reference in your followup thread post, so we can speed
> read through it to verify that nothing essential will be removed or broken.
> *
>
> *package-cleanup* has an option also for cleaning up dupes:
>
> $ package-cleanup --cleandupes
>
> However, in the real world of industrial strength testing, the
> package-cleanup command uninstalls the "real" packages too </fear and
> loathing>!
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