The New rpm Hell -or- Why yum and pup Seem To Be So Broken In Fedora
by Caitlyn Martin
Let's look at today's failure as an example. I had been on vacation and my system was probably 10 days behind on updates. yum decided I needed to upgrade some 166 packages and add 2 more for dependencies. Fine, go do it. No chance. Here is the error message:
Error: Missing Dependency: libecal-1.2.so.3 is needed by package gnome-panel
That seems clear enough but it really isn't. gnome-panel wasn't being upgraded. Rather the package that contained libecal-1.2.so.3 was and doing the upgrade would break gnome-panel. Typing in:
yum whatprovides libecal-1.2.so.3
reveals that it is part of the evolution-data-server package. A new version of that package was rolled out without checking to see if any other package had a dependency on the old version. That is just plain sloppy package and repository management on the part of the Fedora Project people at Red Hat. If this happened just once it would be forgivable but this sort of failure has happened repeatedly over the past two months. To their credit the Fedora Project has, in each case, rolled out a new package for whatever they've broken in a day or two. Still, it shouldn't happen in the first place.
12 Comments
| Ming Chow 2006-06-07 06:18:33 |
Thanks for writing this. And I thought I was the only one having this problem. Is anyone else? One question for you: did you remove evolution before this all happened? Yes, "yum -exclude=evolution-data-server" update is the workaround. As you can imply from the package name, libecal is the API for the calendar stuff in Evolution (http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/developer-doc/libecal/index.html) . Reinstalling evolution-data-server does no good. Worst of all, you can't remove it: a number of things including GAIM, gnome, evolution depends on it! |
| Caitlyn Martin 2006-06-07 11:05:10 |
You are very welcome. I seriously doubt we are the only two who've run into this. I do suspect inexperienced users who find pup or yum broken may try it again, find that things then work, and assume the problem was fixed on Red Hat's end which, in fact, is the correct answer.
|
| Carla Schroder 2006-06-07 15:12:31 |
Yum is still a baby, compared to Debian's aptitude. Debian has a long history of strict quality control on packages in the official repositories, while the RPM world has always been more of a free-for-all, with all manner of half-baked RPMs spewing forth from myriad sources. A major contributor to RPM hell was poo packaging.
|
| Summer 2006-06-08 05:33:23 |
Another good article and you are definately right on when it comes to the question of why this must be addressed. |
| Chris Tyler 2006-06-08 06:12:07 |
I'm running FC5 on a large number of systems and I'm also teaching it at Seneca College, Toronto. I'm not encountering these types of problems on most of the systems and I think that it's largely due to the fact that they're running a superset of one of the package-sets offered during installation, as opposed to a subset. So taking a standard system and adding to it causes few problems, but taking a standard system and subtracting from it leads to grief. This obviously makes it a pain to slim a system down.
|
| sys0p 2006-06-08 07:07:01 |
Most of these are part of running a bleeding edge distribution. "basic functionaly being managed poorly" is an overstatement. In most distributions including fedora, certain breakages occur from time to time. |
| Caitlyn Martin 2006-06-08 10:55:01 |
Carla: Despite it's relative youth I actually think yum is quite good. Perfect? Nope, but neither is apt. Apt is perhaps a bit better at odd dependency issues. The problem isn't yum. The problem is rolling out new packages without checking what the consequences will be.
|
| Ming Chow 2006-06-08 16:24:14 |
Well apparently, the problem has been solved:
|
| Caitlyn Martin 2006-06-09 11:12:09 |
Yes, indeed, it's fixed this time. As I said in the article the Fedora Project always gets this issue fixed in a day or two. Then, a week or two later it happens again with different packages. Hopefully that's coming to an end.
|
| Dubious Dave 2006-06-27 08:28:22 |
Try using yumex. It is a simple but powerful gui for using yum.
|
| Dark Phoenix 2006-07-29 20:12:14 |
As was mentioned before, try yumex. I don't understand why the Fedora people are so determined to push pup and ignore yumex; yumex feels much more complete (more like synaptic) than pup. Actually, pup reminds me of the Windows Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs section... which probably isn't good, considering the WCP sucks to begin with. |
2006-07-31 00:14:56 |
I find smart package manager to be superior to yum or apt. |
