[Yum] how do I ignore failed dependencies???

[Robert G. Brown]

On 4 Dec 2003, seth vidal wrote:

> 
> > Ok...uh, I'm assuming there's a good reason for this, right?  Don't tell 
> > me it's for the same reasons you can't upgrade Red Hat 9 to EL3 --- 
> > because it's for your own good.
> 
> b/c I'm not going to write a program that lets the user shoot him or her
> self in the foot. That was not the point of yum and it won't be the
> point of yum. This has been a hard and fast rule for a long time and I'm
> not waivering on this one.

To amplify a bit further -- if you know enough to be able to figure out
the dependency issues then:

  a) You know enough to be able to just do an rpm --force or --nodeps
AND to know that it is really safe.  If it is really safe -- which is
not, actually, terribly easy to determine without extensive testing.
You can also likely cope (possibly swearing and cursing, but cope) with
the possible sequelae of discovering the hard way that it isn't as safe
as you thought.  An "ordinary user" might well be able to break the shit
out of their system using yum without meaning to if it were enabled, and
would be left cursing and fuming and unable to put things back the way
they were.  So rpm is the low level tool for you the expert, yum the
high level tool with more protection for the masses (AND for you the
expert, most of the time:-).

  b) If you are paying for commercial software, you hopefully are
entitled to at least some measure of support.  Bitch to the vendor that
they are shipping broken RPMs.  This is the "right" solution. Any vendor
that ships RPMs in the first place -- especially for money -- should use
some of that money to pay somebody to provide professional quality work,
which in my mind absolutely includes unborked RPMs.  If this means that
they have to maintain a whole repository tree of RPM's custom built for
various linux distros, so be it, it's why you pay them.  Refer them to
yum as a DISTRIBUTION tool on their end.  You should be able to
yum-install directly from their (possibly password enabled) repository,
for example.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu