From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; Linux i686) Opera 7.54 [en] Description of problem: rpm fails unnecessarily when "installing" an "already installed" package. Why? Say you have a shell-globbed list of packages, like "perl-*" that you want to install. If some of those packages, the perl package itself say, are already installed, then the entire install fails. Using the rpm option "--replacepkgs" is not very clever work-around, since then rpm will waste time "re-installing" an already installed package. What damage is caused if rpm simply skips installing an already installed package by default, simply removes an "already installed" package from its list of packages to install? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.3.2-21 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.rpm -ivh perl-* 2. 3. Actual Results: nothing useful Expected Results: the packages listed to be installed should all be installed by command completion. Additional info:
Skipping packages already installed leads to a degree of indeterminism that damages users confidence. For example, "already installed" is imprecise. Does that mean that there is already a package with than name-version-release installed? What if the names are identical but the contents are not? Even if the contentys are identical, what if the files on the file system have been changed? Personally, I think rpm will eventually have to undertake the verification steps necessary to attempt "best effort" skipping as you suggest. But right now most users are more comfortable with the existing behavior.