yum update problems

[Chris Holder]

>> Yep. Running rawhide on the laptop and the main box at home. Works like
>> a charm. Have been using rawhide since RH8!
>
>Under no circumstances  should you ever ever ever say that rawhide
>works like a charm in a publicly archived forum. You do a HUGE
>disservice to the community and by doing so you encourage people who
>are not prepared to troubleshoot potentially serious breakage to use
>rawhide indescrimately and get into situations from which they are not
>skilled enough in cmdline usage to effectively work their way out of.
>
>Say it with me:  'rawhide eats babies'
>
>The problems you are seeing with missing and conflicting dependancies
>are the most trivial and most common problems associated with rawhide.
>And I dare say.. that anyone who has been using rawhide on a daily
>basis for a length of time long enough to cover a 2 release cycles
>knows this sort of stuff happens regularly....especially during a
>period between "test release phases." What you are seeing right now is
>a generally expected problem.. especially when packages are under
>heavy development and there is significant nightly churn in the
>rawhide tree. The nightly rawhide build tree can inconsistent because
>either something didn't build correctly and was thus not updated or an
>explicit spec file dependancy was not updated to reflect the upgrade
>of another package.
>
>You fix this by searching for bugzilla reports against the specific
>packages with dependancy problems. If there are no reports you file a
>bug to make the package maintainers aware if they are not already
>aware of the problem.  I'm actually somewhat concerned that someone
>using rawhide as long as you have needs to ask for assistance on how
>to deal with such a minor and regularly occuring rawhide problem.
>
>-jef"part of the rushing horde hell bent on reaching Saturday,
>sometime today"spaleta

hm.. from my point of view, his original question was simply whether
this was an intentional change or not, which, given the file structure
changes that have gone into fedora in the past few releases.. hardly
what i'd call a terrible question. I'll agree, it's not a great idea
to give the public the impression that rawhide is something for
general use, but he only responded with the 'works like a charm'
comment, after his ability to use it had been challenged.. in which
case, it could be implied that 'for him, it works like a charm', or
more appropriately, he hasn't had any issues that have caused him to
stop using rawhide.
there's nothing wrong with correcting people on the list, even
aggressively when needed, but come on.. don't snap at someone because
they responded, (fairly politely, if in a way that could be seen as
bad form), to your attempt at goading them.
he's testing rawhide on at least 2 machines, most likely with widely
varied hardware, and using these boxes as his daily computers.. does
he frequently post to the list? yeah.. but he's not usually whining to
get something fixed, he's just passing along what he's seeing, and
asking a question here and there about it. if all the testers minded
their own business, and never made a sound.. what exactly would the
purpose of the list be?
if nothing else, comments like his give users something to find when
they search through the list archives, trying to find out why
something is acting the way it does.

Chris