Beware: External repos can break key transition

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

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