can yum remove old packages?

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 00:17 +0000, Philip Moller wrote:
> Philip Moller wrote:
> 
> > sean wrote:
> >
> >> Rex Dieter wrote:
> >>
> >>> sean wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> on a yum update,  yum didn't do cleanup.
> >>>>
> >>>> Now I have a lot of duplicate packages, e.g.:
> >>>>
> >>>>  rpm -q libidn-devel
> >>>> libidn-devel-0.5.6-1
> >>>> libidn-devel-0.5.15-1
> >>>>
> >>>> How can I erase all the old packages?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I know of no easy automatic way to do it, other than manually.  In 
> >>> this case,
> >>> rpm -e libidn-devel-0.5.6-1
> >>>
> >>> -- Rex
> >>>
> >>
> >> That may be a life's work. It was in the middle of a fc3->fc4 
> >> upgrade. Over 300 packages updated.
> >>
> >> Sigh.
> >>
> >> sean
> >>
> > well, try (as root) :
> > # yum clean all
> >
> # man yum
> 
> CLEAN OPTIONS
>        The following are the ways which you can invoke yum in clean mode.
> 
>        yum clean packages
>               Eliminate  any cached packages from the system.  Note that 
> packages are
>               not automatically deleted after they are downloaded.
> 
>        yum clean headers
>               Eliminate all of the files which  yum  uses  to  
> determine  the  remote
>               availability  of packages. Using this option will force 
> yum to download
>               all the headers the next time it is run.
> 
>        yum clean all
>               Runs yum clean packages and yum clean headers as above.
----
kindly explain how that is gonna help OP - I can't think of a way that
running 'yum clean [anything or nothing]' is gonna help OP here.

Perhaps I will learn something

Craig