Beware: External repos can break key transition
Thorsten Leemhuis
fedora at leemhuis.info
Wed Sep 17 06:46:29 UTC 2008
On 17.09.2008 05:06, Warren Togami wrote:
> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> On 16.09.2008 03:24, Warren Togami wrote:
>>> BTW, I just thought of a horribly ugly but automatic working solution
>>> to this problem: Filter the require on "xine-lib(plugin-abi) = 1.24"
>>> from that package.
>>> This sucks, but at least yum update will upgrade to the latest N-V-R
>>> packages in both repos so this doesn't exactly break anything.
>> It breaks for some times: let's say xine-lib (Fedora) and
>> xine-lib-extras-nonfree (Livna) get both pushed to their repos at round
>> about the same time (like it was the case for the recent packages). Then
>> there is a time window that's afaics round about somewhat between 24 and
>> 36 hours long(¹) where yum on the user's system might chose to use the
>> livna master repo (or a up2date livna mirror) and a Fedora mirror that's
>> not up to date.
>> Thus yum will install the new xine-lib-extras-nonfree from Livna, but
>> not the matching xine-lib from Fedora. Thus all apps that rely on xine
>> will silently stop playing some videos that they were able to play
>> beforehand. I'd call that breakage ;-) A breakage that IMHO is not
>> acceptable, as users won't know what's up and might file bugs.
> You are suggesting that out of sync mirrors causing this software to
> fail as being "unacceptable". Implicitly this means you suggest it is
> better for the entire update transaction to fail and require manual
> intervention?
>
> The former problem is only temporary and likely to clear itself up,
> while the latter is permanently fatal.
Both problems normally would only be temporary. Just this time it
permanently due to the newkey stuff.
> Certainly this suggestion sucks, but is there a better way?
- for the current newkey problem: copying over xine-lib to the updates
repo in the old location could solve this; yes, I know it's not nice;
Alternative: maybe for this single update it might make sense to remove
the requires from the xine-lib-extras-nonfree package *temporary*; but
I'm unable to do that right now as the livna buildsys is down :-/
- to avoid similar problems in the future: Enable skip-broken by default
(or do something else to let yum handle such inter-repo dependency
problems without causing trouble or confusion for the users; that IMHO
is needed in any case)
CU
knurd
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