On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 4:13 PM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I have run across a situation in which one (or more) of the icons in the
> gnome-icon-theme RPM have been damaged (presuming this is the RPM that
> contains the various icons used by Gnome utilities, such as the Gnome power
> manager that displays battery and mains status for a laptop). According to
> numerous comments on this list, it is much better to use yum (e.g., yum
> install) rather than a direct rpm command.  I have found the following
> information on having yum reinstall an installed rpm file from URL
> http://serverlinux.blogspot.com/2009/11/yum-force-reinstall.html
>
> Are the recommended methods safe?  Would it be better to simply download the
> rpm file, and then use a rpm force to force re-installation of an already
> installed rpm file?

When "yum reinstall" is attempted for a core package with way, way,
way too many funky dependencies, and you don't want to take the risk
of destroying a system or interrupting a core service in the process,
one approach is to use:

     yum reinstall package # see if this is a reasonable step, say no if not
     yum reinstall    --nodeps --downloadonly # Use this to get a local copy in

That gets you a local copy of the package in /var/cache/yum

Then find that package, or get it from somewhere else, and use:

    rpm -U --replacepkgs package.rpm

The "--replacepkgs" is typically safer. It's also very handy if
someone broke things in an RPM update process (for  example by
shutting down the system in mid-update).

> Any advice, particularly based upon direct practical experience with EL 6,
> would be most appreciated.

This approach is based not in SL 6, but in work with RPM based
management since "yum" iwas introduced to our favorite upsteam
vendor's base OS.