Call for comments - RPM upgrade

[Martin Stricker]

Jesse Keating wrote:

> On Monday 10 November 2003 23:19, Warren Togami wrote:

> Ok, so there is good sound technical reason to bump rpm on RHL8 and
> 9.  I can live with that, as I think the rest of the list can.

Yes. If it is broken, it needs to be fixed. But what about 7.3? Is rpm
broken there as well? I haven't seen anything unusual, but the only
thing I use rpm for is installing errata or software which is needed due
to changed requirements.

> > We should eventually put up 7.2 and 7.3 for a vote after we have a
> > thorough analysis of the technical improvements in the latest
> > rpm-4.0.5 release.  It is true that RPM was less problematic back
> > then, but my main concern is the broken nature of rpmvercmp in
> > those older versions.
> >   In those old versions, whenever rpm compared a number to a
> > letter, or letter to letter, it would trigger the "two way upgrade"
> > problem which is bad.  Additionally rpm-4.0.4 had *some* deadlock
> > issues that are probably gone in the upgrade version. (Do testing.)

What does "two way upgrade" mean? Is this something that could hit me
while installing errata or additional software, or does it require more
complex situations to show up?

> Ah, ok.  Other issues I see is trying to get yum the same across the
> board. THere isn't an updated version of yum for the 7.x series, but
> there are some nice new features, such as handling of src.rpms and
> whatnot, plus bugfixes.  This would be my main push for upgrading
> rpm on 7.x

What benefit comes with using yum at all? I don't use it, do I miss
anything?

> I would prefer to just go forward with yum/apt.  Yum in particular.
> The yum that we offer for Legacy will be pre-configured with a bunch
> of mirrors in the config file (end user can uncomment the ones they
> want to use), and the cron job can be set up to not auto-update, but
> instead send an email to "root" with a list of available updates.

I already work that way: I have one box where a script looks daily in
the errata directory on ftp.redhat.com. If there is anything new, it is
downloaded, and I get an e-mail. Then I look for the announcement in
bugtraq to decide whether I should install or not, and if yes I start my
update script. I won't trust any automatic update mechanism (and I can't
because most of our servers don't route to the outside world for
security reasons). Looks like yum could have saved me programming my
scripts (but that was fun).

Best regards,
Martin Stricker
-- 
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