Hi Miles
Miles O'Neal wrote:
> I have a system that's been running the original SL4 for a while.  Last
> night I tried to update it following the yum update instructions on the
> SL docs How To page.  Twice.
> 

I assume you are trying update it from SL 4.0 to SL 4.6, which should work.
 From reading through this e-mail, it really looks like this is *not* a plain 
SL4 installation.  At some point, someone has wanted the newest KDE for SL4, 
and so added a yum repository for kde-redhat.
kde-redhat is not supported by us, and so completely out of our hands.  I'll 
point out the biggest clue below

> Both times, at the end, it gave me a handful of missing dependencies
> for mozilla or something similar.  And nothing changed, either in grub
> or after the reboot.
> 
> This morning, going through old emails, I found something about a new
> yum in the contrib section.  Decided to try that.
> 
>    yum --enable=sl-contrib install yum\*
> 
> This went along fine, but after downloading python, etc, I got:
> 
> warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID ff6382fa
> public key not available for sqlite-3.1.2-3.0.el4.kde.i386.rpm

sqlite-3.1.2-3.0.el4.kde.i386.rpm is not part of the SL4 distribution at all. 
We are using sqlite-3.1.2-3.i386.rpm

> Retrieving GPG key from file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-kde-redhat
> GPG key retrieval failed: [Errno 5] OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-kde-redhat'
> 

This GPG key is from the kde-redhat repository.  If you want to install it, you 
need to get it from them.

> I then ran
> 
>    yum --enable=sl-contrib install yumex\*
> 
> which downloaded two packages for yumex and then whined exactly
> as above.
> 
> And, of course, yumex isn't installed.
> 
> I'm using the default yum configs, including repos.
> 

No ... no you aren't.
How to look and see what you really are using.
   cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
   ls *.repo
   rpm -qf *.repo
   rpm -V yum-conf
and finally, actually look at all the repo's.
One of those repositories is pointing to kde-redhat

> Questions:
> 
> 1) Do I need to rerun the full yum update and send the dependency whines,
>    or does someone recognize the problem already?  Would running
>    "yum upgrade" work better"  I used update because the page said to.

Wouldn't matter

> 2) Why am I getting the GPG whine trying to update yum, and is there a way
>    around it?  Is that out of date?  Then why can't I get yumex?

Enabling the sl-contrib really isn't doing anything, you need to disable the 
kde-redhat stuff.

> 3) Is there any way to avoid downloading all the stupid KDE packages for
>    gazillions of languages we don't care about?  Or do we have to just
>    nuke all the original versions?  It's always annoyed me to have the
>    installer ask me questions about which languages I want, but then some
>    packages (kde being the worst) install everything but Martianm, anyway.
>    Personally, I'd find Martian more useful than most of these, but I do
>    understand that's not the case for everyone else. 8^)

See everything above.
To be honest, having that GPG key thing stop you might have saved you alot of 
grief.
If you really do update your machine to the kde-redhat yum repository, you 
pretty much have to stay with them.  They change *alot* of stuff that you 
usually don't change.
But since you have GPG checking enabled, it looks like nothing went through, 
and so you might not have had anything updated.  But then, if it is only 
failling on that one file, then it might have already been updated.
Troy
-- 
__________________________________________________
Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/LCSI/CSI DSS Group
__________________________________________________