Updating to xorg-x11 packages?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>> > Yum started complaining about missing XFree86 packages, which led
>> > me to discover the xorg-x11 packages in the archive.  Is there
>> > some trivial way to migrate to these packages short of installing
>> > them manually (and possibly having to remove the XFree packages
>> > first)?
>> 
>> yum --exclude=Xfree86\* install xorg-x11
>
>And check you have 0.0.6.6-0.0.2004_03_11.6 at least - the previous rpm
>sets had a borked xfs install, which caused X startup to fail.

That's not quite true.  The problem is the transition of
upgrading from XFree86 -> xorg-x11 in the handling of the
XFree86-xfs rpm scripts.  On normal XFree86->XFree86 upgrades,
the scripts will be treated as an "upgrade" and the "problematic"
code does not ever get executed, so the problem is not ever
noticed.

The same code is currently in the xorg-x11-xfs rpm scripts also, 
and when you upgrade from xorg-x11-xfs to the next xorg-x11-xfs 
package that comes out, things will also "just work".

The problem, is when you 'upgrade' from XFree86-xfs ->
xorg-x11-xfs, part of the XFree86-xfs rpm scripts that was never
used before gets activated for the first time, and xfs ends up 
getting disabled because of the order in which rpm runs the 
various install/uninstall scripts.

The xorg-x11-xfs package is doing the right thing.  The problem 
is that the old XFree86-xfs package was not ever written to be 
upgraded from XFree86 to something else that provides the exact 
same purpose, so that codepath never got tested and has never 
caused problems before due to that.

Essentially it goes like this:

- xorg-x11-xfs package is installed
- xorg-x11-xfs post script which configures xfs is ran
- XFree86-xfs postun script is ran which unconfigures xfs
- XFree86-xfs package that was obsoleted by xorg-x11-xfs is 
  uninstalled

... or something very close to that anyway.

The problem however is a one time problem.  Once you're upgraded 
to xorg-x11, and you re-enable xfs, it should just work from then 
on, including through future upgrades of xorg-x11.

In short: Just a one time growing pain.  ;o)



-- 
Mike A. Harris       ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - X.org X11 maintainer - Red Hat