Using yum to update livna nvidia packages?

[D. D. Brierton]

On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 08:50 +0000, Paul Howarth wrote:

> The key difference here is that what you have done before is install a
> new package for a new kernel, based on the same underlying nvidia module
> version. So you can have multiple kernel-module-nvidia packages
> installed, one for each kernel, all depending on one matching nvidia-glx
> package.
> 
> What's happening now is that there is a new version of the nvidia
> module, which means that you need a new version of the kernel module for
> each of your installed kernels and a new version of nvidia-glx. Since (I
> think) there can only be one version of nvidia-glx installed at once,
> this means that all the updates need to be done in a single rpm
> transaction, and yum can't do that because it doesn't want to remove the
> older version of the kernel modules. That's why it's behaving
> differently this time.

My memory may well be failing me, but I seem to remember doing *both*
things in the past. That is: (a) using yum to *install* a new kernel
module when a new kernel comes out, and (b) using yum to *update* an
existing kernel module when a new version of the driver comes out.

However, my memory may be wrong, and perhaps yum has never been able to
do (b). It is possible that I have performed such updates with some
other package management tool, such as red-carpet, or possibly just done
the update by hand using rpm -U.

> Do you see it now?

Well what I think I am seeing is that yum can't do what I think it
should be able to do, and that I probably am misremembering being able
to do it in the past. I am not the only one who thinks this undesirable,
see:

https://devel.linux.duke.edu/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=394

My main concern here is about making this stuff more user friendly for
newbies. I know I can easily circumvent my yum problem and install the
new drivers in a jiffy. It's no problem for me. But I don't think we
should tell people that it's much better to use the nvidia and ati
drivers packaged by livna, because then they are part of your rpm
database and you can use yum to update your system just like you would
for any other update, and then have the user faced with this:

$ 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

$ sudo yum update
[snip]
Error: Unable to satisfy dependencies
Error: Package kernel-module-nvidia-2.6.10-1.770_FC3 needs nvidia-glx = 0:1.0.6629, this is not available.

which will just confuse them no end.

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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