Updates dependency/conflict checking

[Thomas M Steenholdt]

Pekka Savola wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> With FC6 and updates-testing, I've gotten the following error for almost 
> a week now:
> 
> Transaction Check Error:   file /usr/bin/pdftoppm from install of 
> poppler-utils-0.5.4-3.fc6 conflicts with file from package 
> xpdf-utils-3.01-26.fc6
>   file /usr/share/man/man1/pdftoppm.1.gz from install of 
> poppler-utils-0.5.4-3.fc6 conflicts with file from package 
> xpdf-utils-3.01-26.fc6
> 
> Looking at CVS, this appears to have been fixed 5 hours ago [1], but the 
> more generic question remains:
> 
> This isn't the first time this has happened.  Shouldn't there be a tool 
> (or automatic check) with updates system that would check for conflicts 
> across all the packages in "official" Fedora repositories?
> 
> [1]
> http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=219033
> 

Yet another real-life example, why it would be extremely useful to have
a yum feature to simply ignore problematic packages during an update.
Although it really *should* not happen too often with the production
repos, we've seen it time and time again. Often due to incomplete
mirroring and such. But regardless of the reason, the problem remains.

I've seen and tried the --ignore-broken (yum plugin) option which, while
it's intentions are good, has never actually made a difference, when 
I've had dependency problems during an update.

/Thomas