xterm-179-4 broken

[Mike A. Harris]

On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Andre Robatino wrote:

>  Got a fatal error installing the newest xterm package from 8/28, the
>error upon attempting manual install is:
>
>[root at localhost up2date]# rpm -Uvh xterm-179-4.1.i386.rpm
>warning: xterm-179-4.1.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID e418e3aa
>Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
>   1:xterm                  ########################################### [100%]
>error: unpacking of archive failed on file /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm: cpio: rename failed - Is a directory

The only way to handle this, is to uninstall the xterm package 
that is installed first, and then install the new one manually.  
This is due to an xterm package update in which there was an 
error, which the new package fixes.  However the correctly fixed 
version can't be installed if the previous buggy package is 
installed.

Anyone who has installed the buggy version of xterm, will get 
this error whenever they upgrade to any newer xterm package, so 
this problem will be seen by some people likely for a while, and 
there isn't anything we can do about it other than tell people to 
uninstall xterm before upgrading it.  It's not something a newer 
xterm package can fix as the bug is in the older package in a way 
that a newer one can't fix as long as the older one is installed.

Please don't anyone file in bugzilla, as it's fixed already, 
however as I mention above, even though it is fixed, you will 
still get this error, until the bad xterm gets flushed out of 
people's systems.

Hope this explains the problem clearly.

Take care,
TTYL


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat