can yum remove old packages?

[Jim Cornette]

Colin J Thomson wrote:

>On Wednesday 07 Sep 2005 00:00, Claude Jones wrote:
>  
>
>>On Tuesday 06 September 2005 10:58 am, 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?
>>>      
>>>
>>You might want to take a look at Synaptic package manager. It will warn you
>>of the duplicate packages when you run it. It presents a nice graphical
>>interface that lets you quickly see the packages, select the old ones, and
>>remove. It will be still be tedious given what you say a couple of posts
>>later, but, perhaps less so than the command line method.
>>    
>>
>
>Indeed, we should mention that Synaptic is a front end for APT :)
>I have found (just my experience) APT to handle the "OP's" situations quite 
>well, however I have never experienced problems with that large number of 
>dupes.
>
>Just a thought..
>
>Colin
>  
>

Power outages while updating or shutting down a computer while it is 
sgill updating packages can cause this problem. I experienced "multiple 
packages" from both sources before (power outage, shutting down in 
mid-process). The only thing that was lingering on the system is 
actually just the rpm database entries on my messed up systems. 
(Corrected using massive "rpm -e older-version-of-package --justdb" )

I believe that I did get away with updating from the yum cached packages 
before by changing to the directory with the rpms that yum left on the 
system and running "rpm -Uvh *.i386.rpm --replacefiles --replacepkgs" I 
cannot recall if I needed to pass the nodep option or not.

In short, battery backups and adding some governing program to prevent 
the system from shutting down while critical processes are running would 
be a welcome addition to Linux distributions.

Jim