yum dumb? Re-installes rpms you specifically remove

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2006, Jeff Vian wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-07-03 at 23:28 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>> On 7/2/06, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> My Dell laptop hates the new kernel-2.6.17, so I remove it with yum
>>> remove kernel-2.6....
>>
>> Okay.
>>
>>>
>>> Then I go about my business and find that the yum cron job has run and
>>> re-downloaded and re-installed that kernel.  Goddam.
>>
>> What else would you expect ?
>>
>>>
>>> Then I can put exclude=kernel-2.6.17* in /etc/yum.conf, but the
>>> problem just starts there.  When yum runs, it finds updates for kernel
>>> modules on atrpms (for ipw3945 wireless) and livna (video card), and
>>> yum then fails because it cannot install those modules because it
>>> cannot install the new kernel.  So I have to go back into
>>> /etc/yum.conf and exclude some specific versions of those modules.
>>>
>>
>> That's exactly what it should do. You should just exclude al kernel
>> related packages, or let yum be and use grub to boot to the kernel
>> that works for you,
>>
> Or alternatively, do not use the auto update feature of yum/fedora.
>
> I do all my updates about once a week manually and I can see when it is
> trying to do something I don't want and take action *before* the update
> occurs.  I believe many do that to avoid the situation described here.

Or for kernels, you can set UPDATEDEFAULT=no in /etc/sysconfig/kernel and 
the kernel installs will keep the old defualt in /etc/grub.conf.  You can 
also set enabled=0 in /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/installonlyn.conf to keep yum 
from deleting old kernels when new ones are installed.

>
>>> What a hassle.
>>>
>>> Seems to me that if a person manually removes something in yum, the
>>> system should respect that.
>>
>> That would require special rules, and I would not consider such rules
>> to be intuitive.
>
> The rules may not be intuitive, but it is reasonable to expect that when
> one package is excluded yum should automatically exclude things which
> depend on that package.  I would think it should be fairly simple to add
> a change in handling, since yum already has a list of the 'depends on'
> items for each package (or otherwise it could not locate and install the
> needed dependencies.)
> At the present it cannot do that. In the future it should be able to at
> least present a list of packages that are blocked like this and ask what
> to do (install, ignore, etc.).
>
>>>
>>> pj
>>>
>>> --
>>> Paul E. Johnson
>>> Professor, Political Science
>>> 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
>>> University of Kansas
>>>
>>> --
>>> fedora-list mailing list
>>> fedora-list at redhat.com
>>> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> To be updated...
>>
>
>
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs