yum update can commit suicide

[Florin Andrei]

Yesterday I was trying to update my FC6 laptop. Quite a few updates, 
because this system was not used that much recently.

I did not use the updates applet, because I was on a restrictive 
network: first establish a VPN connection, then you can use a proxy 
through VPN to browse the Internet.
Since this is not my typical location, the proxy was not set in the 
desktop configuration.

So I had to run yum manually in a terminal window. First do an "export 
http_proxy=..." then run yum.

Halfway through the update, X was killed by some script in one of the 
update packages. Of course, that also killed yum, mid-transaction. :-( 
Init restarted X, of course, but now I was staring at the gdm login screen.

This is pretty rude, not to mention that killing yum in the middle of a 
transaction can leave the system in a messy state.

I'm not sure what needs to be fixed (don't kill X, or make yum or rpm 
smarter and don't kill X if the session is being run from within X, or 
something like that), I don't even know which package caused that, but 
my take is that this is something that needs to be fixed.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/