[Yum] yum's update behavior on broken repositories

Eric S. Raymond esr at snark.thyrsus.com
Mon Jan 10 15:40:05 UTC 2005


Ever since I installed FC3, all my attempts to `yum upgrade' have 
failed due to missing dependencies.

Half of this is down to poor management at the Fedora repositories.
First it was a mysql library missing, now it's some xfce component.  
They just can't seem to keep it together over there, and I'm beginning
to get rather fed up about that.

The other half of this is yum's problem.  Is there any good reason why:

1. When you do yum update and dependencies are missing, yum bombs out,
   rather than removing dependent packages from the update list
   and installing as much as possible.

2. --exclude makes no difference to dependency calculations.  Even if
   I exclude all the packages with missing dependencies by hand, yum
   still bombs.

I'm not one to complain about such things without trying to send a fix
patch, so I checked out yum from CVS and tried to instrument it.  Only
to find that when I run bin/yum.py it bombs with an unhelpful message.

Would you please include in the INSTALL file some description of how
to do test runs from a checked-out CVS copy?
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
	-- R. Buckminster Fuller



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