Bug 437538

Summary:	yum reinstall gives misleading error message with underspecifed package name
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Bruno Wolff III <bruno>
Component:	yum	Assignee:	Seth Vidal <skvidal>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	rawhide	CC:	ffesti, james.antill, katzj, pmatilai, tim.lauridsen
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2008-03-17 18:25:51 UTC	Type:	---
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Embargoed:

Description Bruno Wolff III 2008-03-14 19:24:05 UTC

Description of problem:
When using "yum reinstall kernel" with more than one kernel installed, the error
message is "Error: No package(s) available to install" which is misleading.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
3.2.12-3.fc9

How reproducible:
100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make sure you have two kernel packages installed
2. yum reinstall kernel
3.
  
Actual results:
Message saying no packages available.

Expected results:
Message indicating that package specification is ambiguous or possibly
reinstalling all of the possible packages.

Additional info:

Comment 1 Seth Vidal 2008-03-14 21:13:08 UTC

at this point I'm inclined to add in code to yum that says:

 if isAllowedMultipleInstalls(pkg):
     print "don't reinstall these, doom, doom, doom"
     exit

in the case of a kernel why are you reinstalling it?
why not just remove then install. And if the kernel is running well that's just
a world of a bad idea.

Comment 2 Bruno Wolff III 2008-03-16 01:06:05 UTC

The reason I am repeatedly reinstalling the kernel is that I am trying to track
down some mkinitrd bugs. Doing a reinstall is a simple way to regenerate the
initrd image using the currently installed version of mkinitrd.
I think it is fine to not do the reinstall if there are multiple packages, it
just would be nice if the error message said that is what is going on as the
current message is confusing.

Comment 3 Bruno Wolff III 2008-03-17 16:28:43 UTC

One of note on this is things work this way even if there is only one installed
kernel that matches one in the repository. For some of my tests I had two
kernels installed, where only one of the two was in the repository.

Comment 4 Seth Vidal 2008-03-17 18:25:51 UTC

okay, I've added a patch to yum to make it tell you 'no' if you try to reinstall
a package like the kernel. It's possible at some point in the future we may
allow this but for now, no.