Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 139012
Upgrade fails if /usr/bin/firefox is a directory
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:54 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041020 Firefox/0.10.1 Description of problem: My (Fedora Core 2) machines all have FireFox installed in a _directory_ called /usr/bin/firefox. Upgrading them to Fedora Core 3 fails mid-upgrade when it tries to replace the existing /usr/bin/firefox directory with the contents of the firefox-0.10.1-1.0PR1.20 RPM. It gives no opportunity to skip installation of the RPM and continue. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora Core 3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install FireFox in a directory called /usr/bin/firefox 2. Upgrade to Fedora Core 3 3. Actual Results: Installation failed half way through the upgrade and required me to reboot the system with no indication as to the cause. I had to remove /usr/bin/firefox manually and re-run the upgrade. Expected Results: 1. Detect the problem before installation starts or 2. Warn about the failed RPM installation but allow the upgrade to be continued anyway. or 3. (re)move the /usr/bin/firefox directory during the installation of the RPM. It seems that it should be more important to complete the upgrade, even if firefox hasn't been installed successfully rather than force the upgrade to be terminated half way through the process. Additional info:
Don't do that then. rpm doesn't support going from something being a directory to a regular file or a symlink due to a number of race conditions that result trying to do this. anaconda assumes that your system is relatively "correct" before doing an ugprade and having /usr/bin/firefox as a directory just doesn't fall into that category.
Should Anaconda not give you the option to skip the RPM causing the problem and continue the upgrade anyway? A system is going to be a lot more broken after the upgrade aborts half way through then if the firefox RPM just never installed properly.