How To Force Yum To Update

[Robert L Cochran]

jdow wrote:

> From: "Robert L Cochran" <cochranb at speakeasy.net>
>
>> Yesterday I attempted to service my mother-in-law's FC4 computer, 
>> which I know needs about 100 Mb or so worth of updates -- most of 
>> that for OpenOffice. I only have a short window of opportunity to do 
>> this since she lives a fair distance. Each time I ran 'yum update' I 
>> would get responses very similar to this:
>>
>> [...]
>> Reading repository metadata in from local files
>> primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================| 969 kB    
>> 00:34
>> extras    : ################################################## 2815/2815
>> Added 15 new packages, deleted 12 old in 3.45 seconds
>> No Packages marked for Update/Obsoletion
>>
>> I know she needs an openoffice update. I don't think yum is running 
>> nightly, but I didn't check for that either, so I could be wrong. How 
>> do I force yum to find the updates?
>>
>> Take Care
>
>
> How do you know it is needed? Is it possible she's already updated via
> a cron job? What does "rpm -q openoffice.org-core" return? It returns
> "openoffice.org.core-2.0.1.1-5.1" here. And this is from a VERY recent
> update, in the day or so.
>
> Are you looking at "updates-released", "extras", and "base"? If not
> you need to configure yum so that it is.
>
> {^_^}
>
I know she needs the openoffice update because I just did get that 
update (to 2.0.1.1-5.1) and I feel quite sure my Mom-in-law's machine 
didn't get that. I did the original FC4 installation a little more than 
a week ago, and updated it once at that time. Since then there have been 
a raft of application updates. Openoffice is one of these. She doesn't 
know enough of Linux to understand what a cron job is, and couldn't have 
set one up. Yum looks at updates-released, extras, and base by default. 
I didn't change anything about that.

I often get this same message on my own machine when I know for certain 
updates are pending -- I subscribe to fedora-announce-list and some of 
the announced updates apply to me. Retrying 'yum update' several hours 
later or the next day will find the updates applied.

Bob