Old broken packages

[Shahms King]

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Panu Matilainen wrote:
*snip*
>>
>> I strongly suspect the problem lies with RPM always comparing an
>> arch-specific package as "newer" than a noarch package, but I'm not
>> certain.
> 
> RPM will happily upgrade such a package, it's yum-specific behavior to
> refuse to change package arch. Set exactarch=0 in yum.conf and it'll
> upgrade that. The other way around this is renaming the package to
> something else.
> 

The behavior exists both with and without exactarch.

>> Note that these problems *appear* to have been fixed in rawhide as the
>> extras development repository does not contain the offending packages.
>>
>> Additionally, trying to track down any potential problem packages is
>> difficult as repoquery will not check versioned requires and insists
>> that python-0:2.4.2-3.2.1.i386 provides "python < 2.4", which it most
>> assuredly does not.
> 
> Huh, you're saying 'repoquery --provides python' on FC5 says "python <
> 2.4"? I have hard time figuring out how it would come up with such a
> thing if it doesn't exist in the package but... Please show me the exact
> command to reproduce that so I can check what the heck is going on.
> 
> Oh and there are such gems around, eg perl has "Provides: perl <=
> 4:5.8.8" which looks pretty dubious to me.
> 
>     - Panu -

Sorry, I mis-typed.  Repoquery, when asked --requires --resolve on the
offending packages will list the python package as satisfying the
requirements, which it doesn't.  Similarly, both rpm and repoquery don't
deal with versioned '--whatrequires' requests (such as --whatrequires
'python < 2.4').

I'm not sure if this is a big deal or not, but I have encountered two
packages exhibiting this problem so far and was trying find any more
potential problem packages and having minimal luck. I wouldn't be
surprised if python-reportlab.i386 is the last remaining problem
package, but the yum-or-rpm behavior that ignores newer noarch packages
still seems like a bug to me.




- --
Shahms E. King <shahms at shahms.com>
Multnomah ESD

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