Is there any way to 'force' a yum install/update?

[Tim]

On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 21:53 -1000, Dave Burns wrote:
> localinstall installs an  rpm located on the local host instead of the
> repository so that yum's database stays up to date/knows about it. yum
> will also use the repositories to satisfy any missing dependencies.
> 
> This is the best way to install packages that are not yet in the
> repositories - get or make a binary rpm (from source rpm or maybe from
> the zip file if you are an rpm wiz), then use localinstall to install
> it.
> 
> I saw a nice trick in a linux cookbook or server hacks book that
> showed a script that basically audited your system for libraries and
> binaries that were not known about by rpm and yum and built an empty
> rpm that just updated the dependencies and clued in the databases
> about the orphans. Personally, I try hard to avoid installing anything
> without yum, so I haven't actually transcribed the script (it was
> long). 

When you install a RPM something by yum, it updates the RPM database.
When you install something using RPM, it update the RPM database.
There's no difference between the installations.  The advantage of using
YUM is that if you need another package, it can arrange to get what you
want.  RPM will just bomb out and tell you it needs something you
haven't given it.  But if you're going to install packages that don't
need extra packages installed at the same time, either using rpm
directly or yum will do the job, the same as the other.

I like the idea of being *able* to add other non-RPM derived files to
the database.  e.g. If you installed a pile of codecs from a tgz file,
nothing else will be aware that they're installed, under the normal
circumstances.  Being able to add such files to the database means that
the next thing that needs one of those codecs will find it's already
there, rather than go asking to install it.

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.22.9-91.fc7 i686 i386

Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5.  Today, it's FC7.

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