Mystery of yum

[Timothy Murphy]

When I ran "yum update" on one of my computers
it failed with the following error message

==========================================
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package nmh.i386 0:1.1-5.fc3 set to be updated
--> Running transaction check
--> Processing Dependency: mh for package: exmh
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: Missing Dependency: mh is needed by package exmh
==========================================

I see that the nmh package it is trying to update is in fedora-extras,
but there does not appear to be any package mh
in any of the "standard" fedora repositories.

I would have thought that all the packages required by
a package on fedora-extras should be in one of these fedora repositories?

I should say that I don't really want nmh anyway,
and I avoided the problem by disabling fedora-extras.

But I am wondering how this arises?
Also, how could one get round it without disabling anything?

Yum is a great resource, in my experience.
But it is very difficult to know what to do if you get a dependency failure.
The only general solution I have found 
is to exclude the problematic package.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland