Distrowatch: What went wrong with Fedora Core 4

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 16:30 -0700, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 19:18 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Thursday 14 July 2005 18:45, Justin Zygmont wrote:
> > >No, don't discuss this any further.  This is far off topic, and has
> > >wasted enough time already.
> > 
> > Well, from my own experience, I do believe its a valid question.
> > 
> > Look, sometimes an ego is going to get bruised, even if its mine 
> > because I didn't read all the caveats, or hold my chew in the correct 
> > side of my mouth, any one of a thousand things.  But when one 
> > application (yum) consistently fubars the system, I don't care whose 
> > ego is bruised, it still needs to be fixed.  If I'm running it wrong, 
> > then so be it, I can be directed.
> 
> yum has never messed up my system.

Then let me show you a rather harmless example of yum messing up a
system:

# yum install eclipse
# yum remove libgcj

During the "yum remove libgcj" some %postun scripts fail. This causes
yum and rpm to leave packages with broken dependencies behind on the
system.

Most users won't notice this, until a side effect of these broken deps
hits or they are using apt-get, because, unlike yum, "apt-get" detects
the broken deps in the system and requests you to fix them.

(Wild guess: I am inclined to think at least some of the
selinux-policy-target issues reported might originate from this issue).
 
> > But first, I have to get somebodies attention so they can tell me 
> > where I screwed up if indeed I did.
> > 
> > Put this way, I let yum update 290 some packages.  To get that far, I 
> > had to mv Pubkeys and rebuild the rpm database to restore it.  When 
> > it was done, the kernel it installed won't boot, and when booted to 
> > the older version, now X complains it doesn't have perms to run, and 
> > I'm root doing the startx.  If those facts bruise an ego, then I'm 
> > sorry, but it doesn't change the FACTS.
> 
> Those don't sound like yum bugs to me - sound like bugs in either the
> software or the packages. Or am I missing something?

>From my experience, gpg-pub key issues in most cases are an rpm problem,
permission issues often are SELinux related, and "kernel doesn't boot"
could be anything.

Ralf