[Yum-devel] new simple "protectyum" plugin

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 05:45:40PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> two items here:
> 1. you might want to check the rest of the ts to see if yum is being
> installed or updated, too. Just for sanity sake

You mean, if yum is to be installed or updated in the same transaction,
don't get in the way? Is there a way to tell the order of things at this
point?

> 2. why not make this more generic and have this be a
> yum-protect-stupidity plugin with a list of pkgnames it will bail out if
> it encounters them being removed. I can think of a few good examples:
>  glibc, pam, openssh-server, coreutils, filesystem, basesystem, etc

Well, in theeeory, that's the beauty of this approach -- there's less need
for a magic list, because all of those things with the exception of
openssh-server are part of the stack of requirements for yum, so they're
already covered. 

And, although I'm not going to test right now, if you *do* remove
openssh-server while still connected, I think if you realize it before
closing the current window, you at least have a chance to put it back.

But, here's the gotcha -- something weird happens on x86_64 -- something I
didn't expect. It works perfectly fine on my CentOS 5 test system, but the
gotcha happens on my Fedora Rawhide machine. Removing 'basesystem' *doesn't*
fail, because for some reason, yum only tries to remove the ix86
dependencies, even though

  $ rpm -q --whatrequires basesystem --qf '%{name}-%{version}.%{arch}\n'
  glibc-2.6.x86_64
  glibc-2.6.i686

Any idea what's going on there?

Anyway, assuming that's a bug that will be fixed, is there anything else
other than openssh-server that might make sense to protect in general?


I suppose there's *perl*. :)

> if the user can specify a 'error if you see these list it would be
> convenient for a bunch of folks, I think.
> What do you think?

I'm really attracted to the elegance of not having any magic list at all.
But I can admit the reality of it being a useful possibility. :)

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>