texlive-base fails install (rawhide)

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:50:41PM -0500, Kevin Martin wrote:
> Todays yum update has a failure for texlive-base:
....
> 1:texlive-base-2012-3.20120926_r27815.fc19.noarch was supposed to be removed but is not!

See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=868556

This is caused by a broken attempt to solve another problem.  The report
was closed with NOTABUG although this is evidently a bug.  Maybe the
developer indeed can invoke "rawhide" and claim that an update failure
is something to be expected (although I have some doubts) but this is
also buggy for other reasons.

BTW - a failed update left in /usr/share/texlive/texmf/ "weird"
symlink(s) which were supposed to replace texmf-local directory but this
cannot be done in that way.  Other "reasonable" methods to acomplish
that are also broken in assorted scenarios.  You can workaround the
trouble by removing texmf-local before trying to update.  If you already
added some "local" content then texmf-local has to be renamed and your
TeX configuration modified (now and in the future) accordingly.  It can
be done, so in this sense texlive-base-2012-3.20120926_r27815 is not
broken even if an update is, but this will put extra demands on users
and a substantial number of those will have no idea what to with that.

   Michal