How To Force Yum To Update

[jdow]

From: "Robert L Cochran" <cochranb at speakeasy.net>

> jdow wrote:
> 
>> From: "Robert L Cochran" <cochranb at speakeasy.net>
>>
>>> Yesterday I attempted to service my mother-in-law's FC4 computer, 
>>> which I know needs about 100 Mb or so worth of updates -- most of 
>>> that for OpenOffice. I only have a short window of opportunity to do 
>>> this since she lives a fair distance. Each time I ran 'yum update' I 
>>> would get responses very similar to this:
>>>
>>> [...]
>>> Reading repository metadata in from local files
>>> primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================| 969 kB    
>>> 00:34
>>> extras    : ################################################## 2815/2815
>>> Added 15 new packages, deleted 12 old in 3.45 seconds
>>> No Packages marked for Update/Obsoletion

Observe that above. If there are only 15 new packages and 12 deleted
packages something is doing updates behind your back. Please check it
out rather than "presume" she needs an update.

>>> I know she needs an openoffice update. I don't think yum is running 
>>> nightly, but I didn't check for that either, so I could be wrong. How 
>>> do I force yum to find the updates?
>>>
>>> Take Care
>>
>>
>> How do you know it is needed? Is it possible she's already updated via
>> a cron job? What does "rpm -q openoffice.org-core" return? It returns
>> "openoffice.org.core-2.0.1.1-5.1" here. And this is from a VERY recent
>> update, in the day or so.
>>
>> Are you looking at "updates-released", "extras", and "base"? If not
>> you need to configure yum so that it is.
>>
>> {^_^}
>>
> I know she needs the openoffice update because I just did get that 
> update (to 2.0.1.1-5.1) and I feel quite sure my Mom-in-law's machine 
> didn't get that. I did the original FC4 installation a little more than 
> a week ago, and updated it once at that time. Since then there have been 
> a raft of application updates. Openoffice is one of these. She doesn't 
> know enough of Linux to understand what a cron job is, and couldn't have 
> set one up. Yum looks at updates-released, extras, and base by default. 
> I didn't change anything about that.
> 
> I often get this same message on my own machine when I know for certain 
> updates are pending -- I subscribe to fedora-announce-list and some of 
> the announced updates apply to me. Retrying 'yum update' several hours 
> later or the next day will find the updates applied.

I'm not sure of this but I believe the default install involves a cron
job for yum updates.

Rather than presuming she needs the updates run the RPM command I cited.
Also make the other checks I mentioned. Otherwise it's impossible to
help you.
{^_^}