[CentOS] CentOS 5.6 will not install due to Firefox error

[Lamar Owen]

On Wednesday, April 06, 2011 10:06:54 AM Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 04/06/2011 03:02 PM, Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
> > Well, my local mirror now has CentOS 5.6! Yay! But, I cannot
> > get it to install. A "yum update" and a "yum --skip-broken"
> > yields me this:
 
> you need to wait for 5.6 to actually be released

I really really wish repositories would be ACID compliant.  Yeah, I know they're not, but I've seen way too many issues with non-atomicity in repository updates and syncs and their interaction with yum update.  If nothing else raise a flag on the repo and essentially tell yum to go away until the sync is finished.  Or sync the repodata last, and leave a couple of previous versions of packages (helps for a yum downgrade, anyway).

I've seen it with Fedora, and with C6 it will have similar impact, since yum-complete-transaction is present in the version of yum-utils upstream for C6.  That is, you might do a large yum update and have an issue, or crash, or the ssh session goes down, or whatnot; yum-complete-transaction is supposed to rescue your bacon in that circumstance; and it will as long as nothing has changed on the repository, as I've used yum-complete-transaction a few times with success.

However, if the repository changes between the yum update and the running of yum-complete-transaction, the transaction completion will fail, since it goes all the way back through the depsolver, and if the resulting transaction is not identical to the failed one the transaction completion will fail.  

Would be so nice to be able to do something like PostgreSQL's MVCC while the repository is syncing newer updates; even nicer if a yum-complete-transaction (run within x amount of time, of course) wouldn't change its transaction and fail out....and it's incredibly difficult to reproduce this failure for a meaningful bug report.

I know, not exactly on-topic, but a pet peeve of mine.....