Re: RPM's that fail in %post...

[Jeff Johnson <jbj redhat com>]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 04:22:49PM -0500, James Olin Oden wrote:
> > 
> > Nah, booleans rot too.
> > 
> > Try
> >     rpm -qa --qf '%{name}\n' | sort | uniq -d | grep -v kernel
> > That's most, if not all, of the partial installs. Prune to taste.
> This works if a previous verison of the RPM was installed on the system.  A
> new rpm that partially installs will fail this test.
> 
> While we are on the subject, I found a real bug concerning this and 
> the --rollback feature.
> 
> Say I upgrade in the following way:
> 
> 	rpm -Uvh --repackage A.rpm B.rpm
> 
> and say A paritially installs.  At that point
> I would receive an error, and would want to rollback, so I 
> do a rollback:
> 
> 	rpm -Fvh --rollback '1 hour ago'
> 
> At this point it does nothing.  I would expect it would install the repackaged
> version of B, but it does not.  I would say this is a bonified
> bug, that would effectively make the use of the transactional
> rollback useless to us.

The only answer atm is to make sure your packages don't partially install.

For the case you mention, failure of %post, this is trivially tested
by installing the package into a chroot or on another system first to
detect the %post packaging failure before you start upgrading lots of
systems.

> 
> Just so you know I am using rpm 4.0.4 on Advanced Server 2.1.

Again, the --rollback option in rpm-4.0.4 requires absolutely perfect
system administration, and is mostly mechanism, not policy.

There's somewhat better policy in latest up2date code, but it's gonna be
a while before --rollback is robust.

73 de Jeff

-- 
Jeff Johnson	ARS N3NPQ
jbj@redhat.com (jbj@jbj.org)
Chapel Hill, NC