On 04/04/2012 09:24 PM, Stephen Berg (Contractor) wrote:
> On 04/04/2012 07:15 AM, zxq9 wrote:
>> On 04/04/2012 09:06 PM, Stephen Berg (Contractor) wrote:
>>> I use the instructions in the URL below and tweaked the process a bit
>>> for some local issues I have. I found that on some systems the rather
>>> long list of packages it wants to update can cause yum to get a bit
>>> confused. So I loop through the alphabet one letter at a time running
>>> "yum -y --releasever=6.2 update a\*", then b\*, c\* etc. That keeps yum
>>> happy. After that the only packages left are a few with capital letters
>>> or numerals at the beginning of the package name. Also had an issue with
>>> autofs, so I grab a copy of the new autofs rpm and update it locally
>>> before beginning the process.
>>>
>>> https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/howto/upgrade.6x
>>>
>>
>> Stephen,
>>
>> That's a handy link to pass out to people. And its on the sl website
>> -- who'd a thought to look there of all places! (O.o)
>>
>> I'm curious about your yum confusion problem. Are you using any
>> repositories external to SL or EPEL? And, of course, I'd really be
>> interested if you have a logged example of the problem occurring or
>> maybe a way to reproduce it.
>>
> I have locally mirrored repos for SL and SL-security. Plus some of the
> addons, elrepo, epel, and rpmforge. I've got all three of the external
> repos filtering out quite a few packages that conflict so normal updates
> work pretty cleanly. I figure that my setup is most likely the cause of
> the issues with yum getting confused, but my workaround keeps it happy
> so I haven't looked into further, and I haven't complained since it's
> likely due to my own set up.

Ah, that makes more sense. I've had weirdness during upgrades when 
pulling things from elrepo or atrpms myself, but I've never seen your 
approach to fixing it (I usually just tell it to pull everything from 
external repos, do the upgrade, and then reinstall the external 
packages). In fact, that going by letter one by one does anything to 
relieve the situation is a surprise!

Anyway, thanks for the explanation. I was afraid there was some deeper 
yum issue I've not seen yet, which would be odd since I'm pretty 
familiar with Fedora (where breaking yum was something of a hobby for a 
while...).