On Fri, Jul 8, 2022 at 7:32 AM Justin Schoeman <justin@expertron.co.za> wrote:
Good day,

Apologies if this is the wrong place to report this (or if this is just
a piece of idiocy on my part).

Recently, I have started getting the following messages with 'yum update
--security' on some of my Centos 7 installations:

"
================================================================================
  Package         Arch              Version                Repository       Size
================================================================================
Updating:
  dkms            noarch            3.0.5-1.el7            epel             59 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Upgrade  1 Package
Updates failed to install with the following error message:
Invalid version flag: or
"

This first occurred in chromium, and now dkms updates.

I have tried upgrading all the yum and rpm packages without any luck.  Some googling shows that the 'or' flag is not (and will not be) supported by the yum version in Centos 7.

Are the Epel builds indeed now being made with RPM flags not supported by yum, or is something deeply fubar with my installation?

I have a sneaky feeling something is messed up on my side, or there would be a lot of similar complaints on the internet, but I find nothing.

Any feedback/advice would be appreciated,

Thanks,
Justin

I hate to say it's on your side, but I think it is.
I installed an old version of dkms on my centos 7 machine and got the following

# yum update --security
--> dkms-3.0.2-1.el7.noarch from @/dkms-3.0.2-1.el7.noarch removed (updateinfo)
--> dkms-3.0.5-1.el7.noarch from epel removed (updateinfo)
No packages needed for security; 1 packages available
Resolving Dependencies

My first guess at the problem is that something got tweaked with /etc/yum/version-groups.conf
There is a "yum version" command, and that is the file associated with it.
My second guess would be something in /etc/yum/vars/
After that, I'd get desperate and do greps of "or" in all /etc/yum/ /etc/yum.conf and /etc/yum.repos.d/

Troy