Fedora F13 to F14 upgrade leaves RPM database with strange mix of fc13 and fc14 packages

[Andre Robatino]

Deron Meranda <deron.meranda <at> gmail.com> writes:

> I guess "ideally" didn't happen :)  Because I definitely have newer packages
> installed under Fedora 13 than I would get if syncing to Fedora 14.
> 
> Is this caused by just luck that the same upstream patches made it
> though to F13 updates before it did to F14?  If there's nothing in the
> updates processes to prevent this, it is likely to happen to other people
> as well; and perhaps with different sets of packages depending on
> when they do the update from 13 to 14.
> 
> Also, what if I didn't know to do the distribution-synchronization ??
> It certainly wasn't done for me.
> 
> Since I currently have a handful of Fedora 13 packages still on my
> system; then in the future when newer patches do eventually come
> out for Fedora 14; will a plain "yum update" have updated those,
> or are they stuck in Fedora 13 land?  And if this is not automatic,
> then it would be very easy for lots of people out there who've done
> an upgrade to have a few (random?) packages installed that will
> "silently" not get properly updated with future patches!

At present it's not too uncommon for packages to have newer versions in older
releases, unfortunately. I think the upcoming AutoQA is supposed to prevent this
automatically, but for now it depends on maintainers doing it manually. The same
issue exists for people who install F14 during development (say Alpha or Beta)
and then update to Final. Early on, the updates-testing repo is enabled, then
sometime after Beta, it's disabled and the updates repo is enabled. When this
happens, the updates-testing packages remain and can cause dependency problems
similar to what you experienced, but "yum distro-sync" should get rid of them.

If you keep the F13 packages, and a F14 update appears, it'll replace the F13
version if it's newer. But unless/until every single F13 package is eliminated,
you can experience dependency problems, so you should get rid of all of them.
After "yum distro-sync", you should be able to reinstall the alchemy package
without further problems.