[Fedora-music-list] installing older kernels

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Sun, 2006-07-16 at 13:37 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-07-16 at 11:09 -0700, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> > Hiya... some of my (Planet CCRMA) users are still having problems when
> > trying to install older kernels with yum. Does anyone know how to tell
> > yum to pretty please install a kernel even if it is version-older than
> > the newest already installed?
> > 
> > I have a set of packages (planetccrma-core-*) that "Requires:" the
> > proper kernel, alsa, rtirq script, etc, etc. Yum refuses to install an
> > older kernel. 
> 
> Not sure how you're doing right now, but seems like you could just name
> your kernel package "kernel-planetccrma" so it doesn't conflict with the
> stock kernels version-wise, and Provide: kernel-%{version} or whatever.
> Check into whatever the "kernel-smp" packages are doing.

My kernels (patched with Ingo's realtime preemption patch) are just
named "kernel" and "kernel-smp" like the rest of the kernel packages - I
don't think the name can even be changed, there are many things that
happen because of the name (I learned that a long time ago). For
example, this is a recent realtime kernel:

a)  kernel-2.6.16-1.2080.13.rrt.rhfc5.ccrma

And one Fedora kernel could be:

b)  kernel-2.6.16-1.2111_FC5

which has a release that is "newer" than the Planet CCRMA kernel. 

My "meta package" requires the first kernel above, ie: to satisfy its
dependencies that particular kernel should be installed. That should not
be a problem as there can be more than one kernel installed at the same
time. This is the relevant line in the meta pacakges:

  # rpm -q --requires planetccrma-core
  kernel-i686 = 2.6.16-1.2080.13.rdt.rhfc5.ccrma

and kernel a) obviously provides it (amongst other things):

  # rpm -q --provides kernel-2.6.16-1.2080.13.rrt.rhfc5.ccrma
  kernel-i686 = 2.6.16-1.2080.13.rrt.rhfc5.ccrma

If kernel b) is already installed and you want to install kernel a)
through the meta package dependencies yum complains that b) is newer
than a) and refuses to install the older version. 

This was also a problem in apt (when I first started using apt) but it
was easily fixed with an apt configuration option in /etc/apt.conf:

        Install-Options { "--oldpackage" };

I thought that commenting out this yum configuration option would help:

  pkgpolicy=newest

But it does not...
-- Fernando