Is there a way to force an update/upgrade in yum?

[Joe Zeff]

On 08/01/2013 03:55 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> If all else fails, I'd use "rpm -e firefox" and subsequently "yum
> install firefox". I know it's not the cleanest and most proper way to
> deal with it, but I believe that rpm would actually do what it's told to
> do. After that it would be up to yum to figure out its own database...

Which is what I eventually used, although I added --nodeps, just to be safe.

And, this gave me a chance to test another yum-related program that had 
been having problems: originally, you could run needs-restarting without 
root.  Later, it would crash if a regular user ran it, because it didn't 
check to see if it had the access it needed.  Now, if you're not root, 
it complains about not being able to read from a large number of 
directories in /proc, but I can now confirm that it does end up with the 
right answer.  There's a bugzilla out about this, and two of us are 
trying to persuade the maintainer that if nothing else, the exit code 
should reflect the fact that it wasn't run as root.  (There are scripts 
that might run it and interpret the error messages as programs that need 
to be restarted; having an exit code that tells it that it didn't have 
root privs can help prevent confusion.)