On Tuesday, June 07, 2011 02:07:41 PM Nicolas Ross wrote:
By looking at the man page, distro-sync wouldn't re-install a package with the same version.
Right; if the NEVR is the same, it won't be reinstalled unless you apply the 'distro-sync full' patch that is in yum 3.4. Karanbir pointed to the patch a few days ago, and it might apply cleanly to yum 3.2.29 (EL6's version). With that patch to yum, 'distro-sync full' will check the checksums and do a reinstall if the installed package's checksum doesn't match the repo.
In theory, changing the repo sources, removing the rhn-specific plugins and modules, reinstalling yum, patching yum for 'distro-sync full', then issuing 'yum distro-sync full' should do a full in-place reinstall of all packages.
When C6 is out, I plan to do just that with my personal tesbed RHEL6 i386 system (it's part of the reason I installed on that box to begin with; I always planned to run RHEL6 on another box later (I bought a subscription....)). But it will have to wait until C6 is out. Or if I wanted to go to SL6.....