recover from broken yum transaction

Seth Vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Mon Sep 22 04:07:45 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 15:29 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> > Doing atomic yum transactions is going to be hard.
> 
> No doubt about that. RPM/Yum atomicity without FS snapshot support is
> impossible to achieve. But I am sure a lot of things can be improved.
> 
> > Probably your effort would
> > be better spent keeping the system from crashing during an update then
> > trying to implement atomic updates.
> 
> I cannot speak for Alexandre - but in my case that is just not
> possible. I will soon be dealing with thousands of servers running in
> rural schools in many countries. Very unreliable power, spotty
> internet connectivity. Once yum has started an operation, I hope it
> can work hard at completing it, even if that's across several reboots.
> 

Rpm updates should behave as expected. When updating packages rpm
installs all the new packages first, then cleans up the old packages.
So, at no time is the system without at least 1 copy of the package. The
most common problem we've run into with yum is getting halfway through a
transaction and power or network or something fails such that the second
part, cleaning up the older packages, cannot occur.

this is where yum-complete-transaction comes in. It will finish up the
remaining steps since it has enumerated them.

Hope this helps, explain.

-sv





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