Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 322521
upgrade fc6-fc7 breaks yum because of newer modules
Last modified: 2014-01-21 17:59:56 EST
OK this one needs if nothing else to go into a search able area for fixes as I broke it then found the way to fix it. How to break Have a current fc6 system. That is you have run yum on the fc6 system and updated all the modules. Upgrade it to fc7. Suceesfully, which is in and of itself a problem. :-( Symptoms Now if you do the graphical update software it just returns with no error. Doing a text yum you get a message that the rpm module is missing. Down farther in the message is that this could be because it is out of date. This is the actual case. The problem is that the updates to fc6 are newer than the modules downloaded during the upgrade to fc7 so the fc7 stuff don't get downloaded and installed. Solution go to the upgrades/7/i386 directory. Download the rpm* rpms and the popt* rpms into a empty directory. In that directory as root do rpm -U *.rpm Now everything will work and you can update the rest of the stuff.
Panu -- we really probably need to keep the version of the Fx rpm < Fx+1. Even when anaconda pulls in the updates repo, there isn't a good way to guarantee that it's available given CD upgrades.
If you need something tested I have about 9 more machines to upgrade in the next month. I will by necessity be using the same general procedure. (No DVD drives on the machines) So if you need me to do something different or check something in the process let me know.
Jeremy: agreed, I just didn't realize this breakage would happen. Lesson learned, rpm is doomed to patch pile-up instead of upgrading to newer releases, sigh. Alternatively bump epoch for each distro version but ugh...
Jeremy doesn't the dist tag solve this problem? So that rpm-4.4.2.1-1.fc7 would be > than rpm-4.4.2.1-1.fc6?
The problem here is/was that latest FC6 rpm is now newer than the *initial* F7 rpm and that breaks especially DVD/CD-upgrades (and network upgrades unless updates-repository was enabled on upgrade). The only way to avoid that is either a) avoid upgrading rpm to never version than what was in FX+1 initially b) pre-empt the version with epoch between distros (eg epoch: 6 for FC6, epoch 7 for F7 etc)
As the guy who started this, I would add my two cents worth. Frankly if the error message was a little more on target, and possibly included a note to a web site for fixing the problem I would think that 90% of the problem would be dealt with. It took me a while to find out that the files were not missing, but were to old. It took me about 30 minute to figure out I had a problem with the graphical version. Then it took me a couple of hours or more to find the problem and probably 10 minutes to fix it. The next time around it would probably be a 5 minute fix. It certainly would be a 5 minute fix with a set of instructions on the screen. Anyone who actually runs into this problem is probably going to be competent enough to execute the set of instructions needed to fix the problem. A nice utility that fixes the problem would also be a possibility. I also think someone should look at the concept of the graphical software update just stopping and exiting without ever displaying anything or giving an error. So my two cents worth. Don't worry as much about the versions, and fix the error message to actually be meaningful. Then fix the graphical version to display the actual error message instead of just exiting.
I have not seen any progress on this one. It seems to me that putting it in a problems files somewhere for people to find the fix and closing it might be in order at this point.
I think this has been open long enough for people to find. There's nothing here to fix except "don't do it again", and I doubt we're going to get a WONT_HAPPEN_AGAIN close-state on bugzilla no matter how long we wait...