Q on yum cleanup

[Ville Herva]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 02:43:56PM +0100, you [Ralf Ertzinger] wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> seth vidal <skvidal at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> 
> > and look for duplicates, remove the older packages with:
> > yum remove package-ver-rel.arch
> 
> Whenever such things happen, I use this to find duplicates:
> 
> rpm -aq --queryformat "%{NAME}\n" | sort | uniq -c | grep -v -E " *1 "

Hmm, I found a few.

Recently, "yum update" has often halted in the middle of updating, usually
in the clean up phase. According to strace, it waits for a futex (sorry, I
didn't save the strace log, will do if it happens again). I've had to kill
-KILL it, HUP nor TERM are not enough. After this, it apparently leaves the
other package version in place, for example:

 > rpm -q xfig
 xfig-3.2.4-7.i386.rpm
 xfig-3.2.4-9.i386.rpm

(xfig is just an example, there were tens of duplicate packages).

I tried "yum remove xfig-3.2.4-7.i386", but after that "rpm -q xfig" still
said xfig was installed twice. I did rpm -e xfig-3.2.4-7 (which I *though*
should be safe), but after that, rpm -q -V xfig-3.2.4-9 said a bunch of
stuff in /usr/share/doc/xfig/html/ and elsewhere were missing. The same
happened with other duplicate packages as well. Nothing fatal was missing,
the binaries were still there, mostly documentation was missing (apparently
somehow shared or identical between the rpm versions.) A reinstall or next
upgrade will of course fix this. ("yum reinstall xfig", "yum install --force
xfig" or "yum download xfig && rpm -U --force .../xfig.rpm" would be nice in
this case.)

Which of these symptoms are to be expected, and are the missing files
related to the rpm bug recently reported to the fedora devel list?

PS: "yum --force install" would be nice for other reasons, too. For example
"yum --force install gkrellm" when I have custom compiled kernel, and it
complains about too old kernel. Please don't flame, a simple "no" will do
:). I understand this is considered too dirty...


-- v -- 

v at iki.fi