recover from broken yum transaction

[Michael Stone]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 12:07:45AM -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
>So, at no time is the system without at least 1 copy of the package. The
>most common problem we've run into with yum is getting halfway through a
>transaction and power or network or something fails such that the second
>part, cleaning up the older packages, cannot occur.
>
>this is where yum-complete-transaction comes in. It will finish up the
>remaining steps since it has enumerated them.

Seth,

Due to memory pressure and constraints on the XO, we regularly see some
RPM %pre- and %post-scripts fail due to OOM. Is there anything which
could reasonably be done to mitigate this problem for our yum-users?

Thanks,

Michael

(Background: we believe that yum is used on our systems primarily by
hackers and 'technically minded' G1G1 donors for customizing OLPC
software releases; to date, general software updates have been made
available through olpc-update, which is atomic, bandwidth-efficient, and
which permits 'emergency rollback' to the previous (known-good) OS
tree.)