Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 327381
pirut prevents scheduled yum updates
Last modified: 2013-03-12 15:57:58 EDT
Description of problem: Running in an enterprise environment we do have nightly yum updates on our managed clients. When a user does not close a local pirut then yum updates fail because pirut locks yum by /var/run/yum.pid. I suggest that pirut only locks yum when the user applies changes. If GUI is running inactively there is no need to permanently lock yum.
This is non-trivial to fix in pirut. This issue is fixed in RHEL-6 which uses a GUI that doesn't need to hold the yum lock while it is running. This request was evaluated by Red Hat Engineering for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Red Hat does not currently plan to provide this change in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux update release for currently deployed products. With the goal of minimizing risk of change for deployed systems, and in response to customer and partner requirements, Red Hat takes a conservative approach when evaluating enhancements for inclusion in maintenance updates for currently deployed products. The primary objectives of update releases are to enable new hardware platform support and to resolve critical defects.