Alsa-utils update broken

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wednesday 15 February 2012 18:16:40 Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:45:11 -0500
> 
> Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Huh? None of that junk is in updates today, that's why people
> > find it broken all the time. The test system using the staging
> > repo can either run "yum update" with no errors, or it can't.
> > If it gets no errors, the staging repo becomes the updates
> > repo. If it does get errors, the updates repo is left alone
> > until the staging repo gets fixed and everyone who pushed
> > an update since the last time updates was working gets mail
> > with the yum update transcript.
> 
> It sounds simple enough... but:
> 
> Whats on the test system? Everything?

Yes, everything. Actually, we would need one test system for each arch, but 
that's not a problem.

> It can't have all packages
> installed due to some conflicting (deliberately, or due to bugs).

I never understood why there are conflicting packages in the first place? When a 
distro has two packages which cannot be installed simultaneously, it's a 
packaging bug, and should be fixed.

Note that the test system would have everything installed, but only a couple 
of essential services actually need to run on it (the kernel, networking and 
yum, basically...). There might be installed packages which have conflicting 
usecases, but they would not be running, so that problem doesn't exist.

As for the packages which would like to own a same file --- it's a bug in 
packaging, and the maintainers need to rebuild the packages so that there are 
no file conflicts to begin with. That's what symbolic links are for. And such 
bugs should be fixed anyway, regardless of the testing system we are discussing 
here.

HTH, :-)
Marko