OK guys - yum is "too smart"

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, jdow wrote:

> From: "Jeff Vian" <jvian10 at charter.net>
>
>> On Fri, 2005-08-12 at 18:43 -0700, jdow wrote:
>>> From: "Claude Jones" <claude_jones at levitjames.com>
>>> 
>>> > On Friday 12 August 2005 6:00 pm, jdow wrote:
>>> >> I am involved, to a slight degree, in testing spamassassin. So I >> 
>>> cannot
>>> >> update spamassassin via yum. It'll break my system badly. I have it
>>> >> installed via other means.
>>> >>
>>> >> So how do I exclude spamassassin from the update and force the update 
>>> >> for
>>> >> evolution which should be perfectly happy with the spamassassin I have
>>> >> installed?
>>> >>
>>> >> {^_^}
>>> > Did you try this?
>>> > yum --exclude=spamassassin update
>>> >>From "man yum" (if you want more details)  Exclude a specific package 
>>> >>by
>>> >>name
>>> > or glob from updates on all repositories.
>>> 
>>> Yeah, but then I also have to exclude evolution. There should be a way to
>>> force things to be "my way". {^_-}
>>> 
>> 
>> You can have it "your way", in one of 2 ways.
>> 
>> 1)  If the package was installed from rpm then insert an
>> --exclude=package clause for each package you are testing and do not
>> want to be included in the standard update.
>> 
>> 2)  Do not install the packages being tested from rpm but instead from
>> source, and yum will not try to update them.
>> 
>> After all, yum uses the rpm database to find out what is installed.
>
> Unfortunately exclude=spamassassin* include=evolution* fails. I cannot
> FORCE evolution to load without abandoning yum and going back to more
> prehistoric techniques.
> {^_^}

You could try installing the official spamassassin RPM using the --justdb 
option.  That would indicate to the RPM db that spamassassin is installed, 
without actually installing it.  Then build and install your tarball 
version.

I think the only real risk here is if evo depends on the actual locations 
of spamassassin files being consistent with the database.  Even there, you 
might be able to solve that problem with symlinks or by setting the 
installation location for your tarball install.

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs