[Yum] dependency problems with yum-priorities on CentOS 5.5

[James Antill]

Nick <oinksocket at letterboxes.org> writes:

> On 23/08/10 14:47, James Antill wrote:
>>  Personally I recommend not using rpmforge, and instead just using
>> repositories that don't require yum-priorities to make sure your
>> system isn't corrupted by accident.
>
> Aha. But do such things exist?  How do I distinguish a good repository from a
> bad one?  Specifically, I'd be interested to know what's recommended for CentOS
> and RHEL - there's EPEL but we found it often just didn't have the packages we
> needed.
>
> Besides, if I were the the maintainers of a repository like RPMforge, I wonder
> how I'd tell if I'd introduced a potentially bad dependency like the one under
> discussion?  If yum can't tell me, are there other tools which can?

 The repos. will tell you in their description if they update core
packages, if they don't ... like rpmfusion or EPEL, then they are safe.

>>  I'm pretty sure this isn't true, there are roughly 6 stages for an
>> install/update:
>> 
>> 1. Processing the argument.
>> 
>> 2. Internally resolving dependencies.
>> 
>> 3. Show what will happen to the user, and asking for confirmation.
>> 
>> 4. Asking rpm to check that everything is fine (test transaction).
>> 
>> 5. Asking rpm to run the transaction.
>> 
>> 6. Running post transaction stuff.
>> 
>> ...I'm pretty sure yum is stopping at #2 for you, which is fine.
>
> No - if it was, that would indeed be much better. This happened twice, on two
> similar machines, so I got the chance to verify that.
>
> It got to the prompt, i.e. #4, and there was no indication anything was wrong,
> so I let it go ahead.  After upgrading a few tens of packages there was then a
> message reporting the unresolvable dependency and a suggestion that I use "yum
> update --ignore-broken" (and I am not sure if this is good advice).

 Let me rephrase ... as far as I know it is not possible for the
message you are talking about to appear a the point you say it is
appearing, and you are the only person who has ever implied it
appeared there (and dep. "bugs" account are our biggest category, by
far).
 It's like if you said yum started playing nethack in the middle of a
transaction. I'm not saying with 100% certainty you'd be wrong, but
I'm pretty sure that's not true.

 Feel free to paste the entire output, or drop by #yum etc.

-- 
James Antill -- james at fedoraproject.org
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