Yum, the repo, and failed dependencies

[Ingemar Nilsson]

Hi.

The last several months, I have seen a rising occurrence of failed 
dependencies when I try to install or update packages. Today, I wanted 
to install the package groups "Development Tools" and "Development 
Libraries", but of course, there were (again) failed dependencies, and 
the package installation would abort.

I understand issues such as mirror discrepancies, and the tendency of 
Yum to only try the latest version of each package. It would be great to 
have a way for Yum to try earlier versions of packages to satisfy 
available dependencies.

If I try to install package foo-1.1, which requires bar-1.1, but only 
bar-1.0 is available (e.g. due to lagging mirror sync), wouldn't it be 
possible for Yum to try with foo-1.0 instead? Is there maybe already 
such an option? As it is now, I'd have to track down all those packages 
manually, just because Yum insists on installing the latest version. It 
should be the default, but it should also try older versions if it 
cannot satisfy the dependencies of the latest version.

With updates, there is the skip-broken Yum plugin, but that won't help 
when I have a specific package to install.

Regards
Ingemar