[Yum] Can Yum install multiple versions of the same RPM?

[John Rouillard]

On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 02:06:15PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 11:31 -0600, Wayne Sweatt wrote:
> > Yum appears to be feature-poor. I don't like it anymore.
> sorry to hear that. I must have missed an email in there.

Yeah I think it was my email that went missing. Although I have to
admit I am surprised by Mr Sweatt's reaction, as I could even claim
it's an RPM bug.

I'll try resending my earlier email I think I used the wrong from
address. It looks like a plugin should do the trick well for my use
case at least.

> > Looks like I go back to our perl script and rpm to do what is a  
> > completely sane thing to request of a package manager - multiple  
> > version installs from a repo/list.
> 
> you can do that with yum look at the installonlypkgs directive in
> yum.conf

Except a typo in the yum.conf file can mess up the RPM database.  You
can't make the RPM know it should be run via install and have it
verify that it is running as part of an install and not an update.

> >  All it's done here is embarrass me and  
> > yum, not to mention be a waste of time and effort.
> I'm not sure how that's happened, but okay.

Ditto.

> > Unless anyone has a solution for installing ALL versions of a package  
> > from a repo ...... so long and good luck with this yum thing. Looks  
> > like it was just designed for desktop PC use.
> it'll try to install the highest version by default unless you specify
> each version completely
> 
> yum install mypkg-ver-rel mypkg-ver+1-rel+1 etc, etc
> 
> yum was designed for server deployments and large deployments of
> systems. It was originally intended to be consistent and to not give
> admins big surprises in bad ways.

Sadly it doesn't support most depot models where multiple versions of
the same software are available on the host at the same time. You can
verify from the rpm that it is being installed is you use rpm but not
yum.

Stay tuned for my email that may have triggered this.

-- 
				-- rouilj

John Rouillard
System Administrator
Renesys Corporation
603-643-9300 x 111