Distrowatch: What went wrong with Fedora Core 4

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 06:24:35AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > yum has never messed up my system.
> Then let me show you a rather harmless example of yum messing up a
> system:
> # yum install eclipse
> # yum remove libgcj
> During the "yum remove libgcj" some %postun scripts fail. This causes
> yum and rpm to leave packages with broken dependencies behind on the
> system.

What's happening exactly in this example? Yum libgcj's postun scripts fail,
so it's been removed, but the transaction bombs out so some things which
depend on it aren't removed?

What *should* yum do in such a case, and how should it do it?
(Non-rhetorical question!)

> Most users won't notice this, until a side effect of these broken deps
> hits or they are using apt-get, because, unlike yum, "apt-get" detects
> the broken deps in the system and requests you to fix them.

It might be a good idea to periodically run "package-cleanup --problems"
(from yum-utils). Maybe yum-utils should come with a cron job that does that
weekly or so by default.....

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
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