On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Lamar Owen wrote:
I would consider http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1483 to not be minor.
Hi, Lamar -- as it is my bug, a bit of context for those who have not read it is in order. -- smile -- In the seven hours it took me to run down the cause, I assure you, I did not consider it minor either. Thus my early and formal report and commentary for others to find.
I would note that Johnny and I, and Seth at the end, worked on this both in the main #centos IRC channel, and out of channel, to run down hypotheses for me to test. Thanks guys.
I looked over Red Hat's Bugzilla and didn't, in the few minutes I skimmed, see the same issue in upstream. It could be related to yum's means of doing the package update versus up2date's method; on a production DNS box I had the problem mentioned in this bug, but on a machine that wasn't the production name server I didn't.
No surprise that yum/sqlite issues do not affect the upstream, as their approach on the updater varies.
This bug hinges, very much, on the non-atomic nature of 'hot' system updates, and the fact that the yum-needed, sqlite-maintinaed cache of pacakges got munged half way through, to reproduce.
It is 'luck of the draw' as there are no relevant Requires in play, in the transaction sort as to whether the bind-libs and bind update fall on the same side of the update failure -- so long as they are NOT on differing sides, there is no problem; When they varied, not surprisingly, bind gets confused. ;0
I reproduced the issue using the proper yum sequence, updating python-sqlite, then sqlite, the updating yum, then doing a clean all, and had the problem.
and, in my post-analysis, it looks like there a pretty strong liklihood that this approach is great for over 90% of the boxes out there. Boxes with 'tight' partitioning, or packages held back (exclude=) from updates are a bit more likely to need two or more passes, and so expose themselves more frequently to the sequencing risk, where any failure needs manual intervention, to recover from.
-- Russ Herrold