Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 124286
Errors installing an RPM are handled inflexibly
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:43 EST
Description of problem: During the installation of a clean system, if an RPM fails to unpack correctly, then a dialog box appears to report this problem, and offer the possibility of trying again. There are two flaws with this: a) Having clicked "OK", the dialog box stays up, making it difficult to tell whether/when the second attempt has also failed. b) If the installation media is indeed corrupted, then there is no way to skip this RPM and continue. It's not even possible to cleanly abort the installation and return to the configuration screens. The only option appears to be to reboot the system and start the installation right from scratch. Expected results: a) The dialog box should be removed before starting to retry installing the RPM b) The dialog box should have an option to skip this particular RPM, and continue with the installation.
Unfortunately, there's not much we can do in this case. There's no good way to tell the "importance" of a package and whether we can skip it and still have a reasonably sane system.
You probably can't do so automatically, no. But the person doing the installation might be able to. Why not at least offer them the *option* of continuing? (with suitable warnings about a broken system) If nothing else, they could make a note of the missing RPM and install it manually later. And what about the other half of this bug report - taking down the dialog box before retrying?