[Yum] ok, so how come "yum update" doesn't?

[seth vidal]

> # yum install fedora-release
> 
> to officially stamp the box as 0.95.  at that point, i had the 
> aforementioned problem where i couldn't "yum update yum", which i
> solved by just backing off and using "rpm -Uvh ...".  the box is now
> officially version FC release 0.95, running yum 2.0.4.

yes it was a known bug effecting only the transition from severn BETA 2
to severn BETA 3.
It's been fixed and therefore I'm not too terribly concerned with it for
that reason.

> at this point, however, "yum list updates" tells me that there's 364
> packages that could be updated, and just running "yum update" runs for
> *several* minutes before bailing telling me that i need more space on
> /usr, and that's the problem.


Then set diskspacecheck=0 in /etc/yum.conf and take your chances.


> if i understand this correctly (and i very well may not be), this strikes
> me as a significant problem.  it's quite possible that someone may install
> a version of fedora some time after it's released, when the available
> updates have built up to the point where this error will occur.  and that
> means it's going to keep happening *every* *night* when yum.cron is run,
> no?  so the system will *never* be updated, as it will have this space 
> error every night.

But this isn't a yum bug! I added an option some unknown number of
months ago to allow you to disable the diskspace check. If you consider
the above to be a serious bug then file it at bugzilla.redhat.com
against the rpm component. Be prepared for a lengthy explanation of why
it is hard to do calculations on links and softlinks and glibc-common
and all sorts of very, very detailed and highly confusing things that
I've heard about on multiple occasions from Jeff Johnson. I'm not in a
position to solve those problems, however, I am in a place to hopefully
make it possible for you to ignore them. So set diskspacecheck=0 under
[main] in yum.conf and try it.


With regard to the never being updated - yah that will happen. Notably
if you're out of diskspace and you can't download the packages you'll
need you'll have that problem too. It spits out errors, the print to
stderr from cron, which means whoever gets cron email will see the
errors. What else should it be doing?

-sv