[CentOS] yum issue with extras repo?

drew einhorn drew.einhorn at gmail.com
Thu Sep 10 15:01:04 UTC 2009


I should probably rewrite the following, moving some paragraphs around.
But I'm done for now.

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:20 AM, Ralph Angenendt
<ralph.angenendt at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2009-09-09 at 15:09 -0600, drew einhorn wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Akemi Yagi<amyagi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Dave Stevens<geek at uniserve.com> wrote:
>> >> As you can see below I am having a problem checking for updates. This
>> >> happens repeatedly. I have to kill the process then rerun. I have
>> >> tried "yum clean all" but no joy - the process hangs again on "extras"
>> > I suspect it is the non-CentOS repos that are causing the hang (?).
>> >
>> > You might want to check that by running:
>> >
>> > yum update --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=base,extras,updates
>> >
>> > and see if this one runs fine.
>>
>> This will get things back to standard repos only.
>>
>> But if you have already loaded an incompatible package  from a
>> nonstandard repo, this will not fix it.
>
> This is related to the problem at hand how?
>

The OP has a problem resulting from mixing standard and 3rd party
repos, and has noticed some obvious issues.  There may be much
more subtle, less obvious issues.  For example, a 3rd party repo,
may have replaced a standard library with a version with a subtle
incompatibity.  It may add a bug, along with a feature necessary
to support another package that it provides.

It doesn't happen often.  But it can and does happen.

>> Rather than trying to figure out what you have and how to fix it,
>> it may be easier to start over an build a new system from scratch.
>
> This isn't Windows.
>

True.  But figuring out which packages came from which repo, can
be difficult.  There was a hotly debated repotag battle that could
have mitigated the problem.  The epel folks were strongly opposed.

The problem becomes really nasty, when package xyz from repo A,
is incompatible with package xyz from repo B.

>> You can probably get the 3rd party repos to play nicer with one another
>> by using yum-priorities.
>>
> This is related to the problem at hand how?
>

The OP was using packages from the standard repos,
epel, and a couple other repos I never heard of for
a reason that he did not share with us.  yum-priorities
can be used to control which packages are installed
from which libraries.

Count the mumber of packages on your system.  Do a:

    rpm -qa | wc

If you have subtle problem with compatability between repos.

Do you want to go through all those package determine which repo
each package can from and determine whether there are compatibility
issues with packages from other repos?

Or do you want to start over installing only packages from the
centos repos that have been tested by the centos developers.

Then add third party repos with yum-priorities preventing centos
packages from being replaced by non centos packages,
but adding needed packages and their prerequisites from 3rd party
repos.

>> There are techniques for finer grained management of
>> compatiblity issues among repositories, that I have never
>> needed to learn about.  Someday this is going to sneak
>> up and bite me.
>
> Yes, probably, but still not related to the problem at hand.
>

epel is careful not to replace package from the standard repos.
I have no idea whether the repos other repos (I never heard
of them) are as careful.

epel is not concerned about their
compatability with other 3rd party repos.  And there is
a lot of lingering animosity.  Just mentioning epel in some
places is enough to evoke a bitter response.  I did not want
to get into those issues.

Sometimes the problem does get all the way down to
very nasty, tangled compatibily issues among repos,
and there is a solution, but it's not easy.

>> Pretty sure there is a 3rd party repo page in the centos wiki.
>
> Yes, but you couldn't be bothered to check, could you?
>
> Sometimes it would be smarter to not try to help.
>

I'm not the one who has a problem and needs to do the research
on this problem.

I gave the OP a hint on where to look.

> Ralph
>

But since you insist.

Here's the wiki page on repositiories.

    http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

New repositories have been added since the last time I
looked.  I have not looked to see whether the repositories
used by the OP are discussed here.

And here the wiki page on yum-priorities.

    http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities



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-- 
Drew Einhorn



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