Curious problem with yum

Brian Mury brianmury at alumni.uvic.ca
Thu Nov 12 02:09:03 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-11-11 at 23:15 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote: 
> But now it seems to say that iptstate requires libnetfilter_conntrack.
> So why didn't it say that before when I yum-installed iptstate?

It didn't say that before because you already had libnetfilter_conntrack
installed. You must have had it, because you had already had iptstate
installed, which requires it.

When you removed iptstate, it did not remove libnetfilter_conntrack
(which does *not* require iptstate - the dependency is "one way").

When you then installed iptstate again, yum saw that you already had the
required libnetfilter_conntrack installed, so the dependency was
satisfied.

When you ran "yum update", yum saw a new version of
libnetfilter_conntrack was available and tried to update it. But - uh oh
- iptstate requires a *certain version* of libnetfilter_conntrack, and
the *new* version of libnetfilter_conntrack does not satisfy that
dependency! So yum complained, and rightly so.

What should have happened was for a new version of iptstate to become
available at the same time as the new libnetfilter_conntrack. The new
iptstate package is now in updates, BTW, though not yet on all the
mirrors.

BTW, if, when you removed iptstate, you had *also* removed
libnetfilter_conntrack, then tried to reinstall both, you would have
seen the problem, because yum would have had to get
libnetfilter_conntrack from the repo and would have gotten the new
version. The version that remained installed when you removed/installed
iptstate was the old version.

> yum is a great tool, in my view, and one of the best things about fedora.
> But it is a bit confusing when a program seems to contradict itself.

No contradiction. The logic is correct (and actually quite
straightforward once you wrap your mind around it).





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