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Description of Problem: if you do not have propers requirements for a package in kickstart mode seomtimes the installer doesn't abort. in most cases if package B needs package A, and package A isn't specified, the automated install halts. howevere if an rpm is present that requires rpmv4 is attaempted but rpmv3 is being installed, the rpm db entry is toasted for that package with no warning. By toast I am meaning the entry is in the DB, but no files are installed (so an rpm -e fails for rpm's with post install scripts withoutout doing a rpm -e --noscripts). Example of one rpm is ucd-snmp-4.1.1-3.i386.rpm, but all the new rpm's like xntp3 are this way. How Reproducible: very. Steps to Reproduce: 1. setup kickstart environment with latest updates sans the rpm4 ones Actual Results: corrupted install Expected Results: abort with an error Additional Information: See bug #40183 for some related information
There are many ways to break the installer by removing the packages that it expects to find. When a package requires RPMv4, it *really* must have it, so it doesn't surprise me that the installation would either fail or behave very strangely, or even leave you with a corrupted system. I agree with you that it would be nice to provide some kind of warning, but there are essentially an infinite number of ways to break the install tree on the ftp server by doing strange things to it, and it would be almost impossible to write an installer that handled an infinite number of corner cases.
so there is no way to get the error status from rpm during the install? seems like on the rpm -i call (or whatever the equiv. one the installer does) checking the return value and tossing an exception would be possible. FYI, some of the rpm's actually don't really require rpmv4. they will die during the install without it, but post install they will install fine.