On 08/01/2013 03:55 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
If all else fails, I'd use "rpm -e firefox" and subsequently "yum install firefox". I know it's not the cleanest and most proper way to deal with it, but I believe that rpm would actually do what it's told to do. After that it would be up to yum to figure out its own database...
Which is what I eventually used, although I added --nodeps, just to be safe.
And, this gave me a chance to test another yum-related program that had been having problems: originally, you could run needs-restarting without root. Later, it would crash if a regular user ran it, because it didn't check to see if it had the access it needed. Now, if you're not root, it complains about not being able to read from a large number of directories in /proc, but I can now confirm that it does end up with the right answer. There's a bugzilla out about this, and two of us are trying to persuade the maintainer that if nothing else, the exit code should reflect the fact that it wasn't run as root. (There are scripts that might run it and interpret the error messages as programs that need to be restarted; having an exit code that tells it that it didn't have root privs can help prevent confusion.)