[Techtalk] Fedora 17 yum woes (dupe packages)

Gwen Morse gwen.morse at gmail.com
Sun Dec 30 10:12:25 UTC 2012


On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 2:11 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?
>

Sorry, I should have been more specific. At the the time I was simply
concerned about determining "if" there was any reasonable chance of
resolving things or whether I absolutely had to reinstall.

Your answer and the answers that followed indicated it would have been possible.

> 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.

I would have gladly ignored them but every yum transaction failed with
a warning that I had dupes (including when I used the flag to ignore
the duplicates).

> However, in the real world of industrial strength testing, the
> package-cleanup command uninstalls the "real" packages too </fear and
> loathing>!

Yes and that's exactly why I wanted to ask on the list rather than
proceed and hope for the best. Uninstalling 3+ gigs of base packages
would have broken my system.

In the end, I opted for a clean install of 15 and then ran preupgrade
twice to get to 17. It went surprisingly smoothly. I have a few
lingering sound issues, but TBH I don't remember a time when I didn't
have some sort of sound issue under linux. :D


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