[Yum] yum admin question

[John Uhlig]

Hi. I am new to this list so please excuse any breach of etiquette.

We have recently switched from using redcarpet update config to yum 
due to its simpler and more robust design features. 

We have a mix of redhat 8/9 systems. While trying to update/patch the
redhat 8 systems, I got following error and the yum update exited
without installing any updates:
=======================================================================
Calculating available disk space - this could take a bit
Errors installing:
('file /usr/lib/libwraster.so.2.2.0 conflicts between attempted installs 
of WindowMaker-libs-0.80.2-0.fdr.2.rh80 and 
WindowMaker-0.80.2-0.fdr.5.rh80', (6, '/usr/lib/libwraster.so.2.2.0', 0L))
==========================================================================

After several iterations, I finally discovered that removing the fedora
entries from our /etc/yum.conf file allowed the updates from our local
and other remote repositories to run to completion.

(entry in yum.conf)
=================== 
[fedora80]
name=Fedora Red Hat Linux 8 stable
baseurl=http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/fedora/redhat/8.0/i386/yum/os/
##
[fedoraupdates8]
name=Fedora Red Hat Linux 8.0 stable
baseurl=http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/fedora/redhat/8.0/i386/yum/stable/
==========================================================================

I would expect this sort of conflict to occur fairly often and experienced
it many times while using redcarpet (one of the reasons we switched). I 
would prefer not to edit multiple client yum.conf files and am not an 
rpm/dependancy guru. My primary concern is to get up-to-date security patches 
installed.

Can anyone tell me if there is a switch/option that allows yum to skip update
conflicts and run to completion for the rest?

thanks,
John.