Hello,
When RedHat started naming their rpm's with a %{dist} tag, it took us a little 
while to figure out the correct way to proceed.  As a result, we pushed out 
some errata rpm's, that have poor names.
They are named in such a way that both RPM and YUM think that the newer errata 
are older than the old errata.  As a result, they won't update them.
We pulled these poorly named errata out of the repositories as soon as we knew 
about them, but some machine's got the updates.
It's not that the packages are bad, it's just that you cannot update them to 
the latest errata if there is a security problem.
I've finally got the fix working for this.
yum-versionfix is a plugin for yum that takes a list of packages, and what 
those packages should be replaced by, even if rpm or yum thinks they are older 
than the original packages.
There is also a new patched yum for SL4.  It is only a 4 line patch that allows 
it to do rpm downgrades.  It's actually 4 lines taken directly from the yum in SL5.
Together, these packages should update your poorly named packages.

To test

SL4
-------
       yum --enablerepo=sl-testing install yum-versionfix
or
   rpm -Uvh 
http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/40rolling/testing/i386/RPMS/yum/yum-2.4.3-3.SL.noarch.rpm
   rpm -Uvh 
http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/40rolling/testing/i386/RPMS/yum/yum-versionfix-1.0-2.sl4.noarch.rpm

It will be enabled by default.  So, all you have to do is
   yum update
and you should see a package or two needing to update.

Thanks
Troy
p.s. If anyone has a better way of explaining this, please let me know.  This 
seems a bit wordy and scary.
--
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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/LCSI/CSI DSS Group
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