Using yum to update livna nvidia packages?

[D. D. Brierton]

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 21:02 +0000, Paul Howarth wrote:

> What's happening is this:

Paul, thanks for helping out. You may well be right, but let me just
give you my reasoning on the issue:

> You currently have kernel-module-
> nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3-1.0.6629-0.lvn.6.3 and nvidia-
> glx-1.0.6629-0.lvn.6.3 installed. The kernel module, being a kernel
> module, is only ever installed, not upgraded, by yum.

But yum lists it as an available update! The kernel modules have a name
which includes the kernel version they are a module for, and they have a
version number:

kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3-1.0.6629-0.lvn.6.3

is 

version no	1.0.6629-0.lvn.6.3

of

package		kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3

> So when a new version comes out, the old one is still kept by yum.

I could be imagining this, but I am sure I have upgraded using yum in
the past. Now if a new kernel comes out then a new package called
kernel-module-nvidia-<kernel-name> will become available, and *that*
needs to be installed alongside any modules already installed for older
kernels. But,

kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3-1.0.7167-0.lvn.1.3

is just a newer version (1.0.7167-0.lvn.1.3) of an already installed
package:

kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3

> However, nvidia-glx
> is not a kernel module and so when a new version of that comes out, it
> gets upgraded, deleting the old version.

Yes.

> So, if you want to install the nice new kernel-module-
> nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3-1.0.7167-0.lvn.1.3 package, yum will see that it
> requires to update the nvidia-glx package to version 1.0.7167-0.lvn.1.3.

Yes.

> However, doing that would break the existing kernel-module-
> nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3-1.0.6629-0.lvn.6.3 module, which requires
> nvidia-glx-1.0.6629-0.lvn.6.3.

No. It should just upgrade the existing kernel-module! (At least that is
what I think it should, and what I thought it used to do. I might be
wrong on the last point.)

Note, when a new kernel comes out and the nvidia kernel module is
rebuilt for it yum (correctly) does not list it as an update. You have
to check for its availability with "yum list available kernel-module-
nvidia-*", and then yum install it when it becomes available. That's
exactly right, and what you have described above. The kernel module
under discussion is a newer version of an existing kernel module, and
yum does indeed list it as an available update:

$ sudo yum list updates
[snip]
Updated Packages
kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3.i6 1.0.7167-0.lvn.1.3     livna-testing
nvidia-glx.i586                          1.0.7167-0.lvn.1.3     livna-testing

Do you see how I have reasoned myself into suspecting that there is
either a packaging bug or a yum bug here? As I said, maybe I'm just
missing some fundamental thing here, but I'm not quite sure what ...

Thanks for the help.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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