On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 10:35:23PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 23:03 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 04:16:43PM +1100, Ankur Sinha wrote:
> > I know
> > I can probably fix it removing each package individually etc, but it'll
> > take me less time to wipe and reinstall everything.
>
> package-cleanup --cleandupes
>
> does such removals in one transaction.
I don't want to be too categorical about it, but I deeply distrust that
option. IIRC, the one time I tried to use it, I found that what it does
is really *remove* packages,
Well, yes. That why is there. If you want just an information then
package-cleanup --dupes
will show that.
which is almost never what you want if you
have dupe problems
I was unlucky enough to need --cleandupes some number of times, for
various reasons, and this is exactly what I wanted to happen. Maybe
a confirmation request would be not out of place but that is another
story.
Unfortunatly in any slightly more complicated situation
'yum-complete-transaction' was for me consistently screwing a big way.
Either it was outright refusing to work due to dependencies and
attempting to deinstall most of the system including some crucial
libraries and programs.
- that is, if you have both 'foo-1.0-1' and
'foo-1.0-2' registered as 'installed' and you run 'package-cleanup
--cleandupes', what seems to happen is you wind up with 'foo-1.0-2'
registered as 'installed', but *all the files are gone*, or something
similarly ridiculous. It was badly broken, anyway.
Maybe I was just lucky but most of the time --cleandupes worked for me
just fine. Many years ago I have seen something like you describe for
a few minor packages but that is trivial to fix. I did not run into
something like that ever since.
I still stick to the old routine for dupe fixing: 'rpm -e
--justdb
--noscripts (older_version)',
This, for a change, leaves you with an asorted leftover files lying
around. You should now sweep all system directories with 'rpm -qf
<file/directory>' and for every one reported "not owned by any
package"
decide if it was generated or it should be removed. A long and not
funny job.
Anyway - if you prefer a hard way this is your choice.
Michal