[Yum] Stupid User Stories (was:Yum munging systems)

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 09:49 -0500, Troy Dawson wrote:
> Just a fun story.
> This isn't yum's fault, just a "I can't believe he just did that"
> One of my users came to me telling me of what he had just done.
> He said he was trying to trim down his system, so was getting rid of 
> various packages he didn't think he needed.  Well ... you know there are 
> really a couple of rpm's that EVERYTHING depends on.  He found it, and 
> thought it wasn't important. (I'm currently trying to track it down, I 
> think it was initscripts, but don't remember, but for this story we'll 
> say it is.)
> So he does a "yum remove initscripts", and the resulting list of rpm's 
> that it wan't to remove scrolls off the screen.  He doesn't see anything 
> really important on the part that is on the screen, so he hit's "y" and 
> let's it go.
> Well ... it's his testimony that yum happily will remove itself, as well 
> as python.  But the system finally barfed after all the rpm packages had 
> been removed and it was still trying to work with the rpm database.
> Needless to say, a fresh install soon followed.


I think you would benefit, greatly, by adding a default plugin to your
systems once the current 2.3 tree goes to stable.

that plugin would count the number of packages in the 'remove' state and
simply exit if the number exceeds a certain amount or includes certain
packages, like rpm, or glibc. :)

-sv