On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 16:26 -0600, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 02:51:04PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 11:18 -0600, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> >
> > Running 'package-cleanup --cleandupes' would likely help. After
>
> I'd highly recommend being very cautious about that, because what this
> seems to do is actually remove the package. That is, if you have
> foobar-1.1 installed and foobar-1.0 as a 'ghost' in the RPM database,
> after doing package-cleanup --cleandupes , you will have no 'foobar'
> package installed at all.
Eh? On all occasions I was using that (a number of times after
botched updates for one reason or another) it was always removing
specifically foobar-1.0 and not foobar-1.1. One caveat though.
If some dependencies for foobar-1.1 would be missing it _may_ grab
foobar-1.1 due to removal of dependencies. It asks for a
confirmation if you are not running '-y' and it is indeed a good
idea to pay attention. 'yum-complete-transaction' is likely the best
when it can be applied but it may get confused as well.
> I comprehensively screwed over a system by
> using --cleandupes once.
Maybe something was buggy or maybe you did have dependency problems?
No way to tell now.
Yeah, unfortunately. I did say it may just have been something anomalous
in my case.
>
> What's better to do in the case of having a 'ghost' package in the
> database - it's not really 'installed' in the sense of the files being
> there on the disk, but it's in the database - is 'rpm -e --justdb
> --noscripts' .
If there are still files which belong to foobar-1.0 and not foobar-1.1
(/usr/share/doc/foobar-1.0/ is the most obvious example but this is
not the only possibility) then they will be left on your system and
now not claimed by any package. Cleaning that up "by hand" is a long
Indeed. That's why I said this is better *in the case of a 'ghost'
package*, where the files have actually gone but the package entry
remains in the DB.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net