Preserve me from cow orkers (software developers, mind you) who install rpms with –force (without bothing to read and understand the message they got when they attempted to install without –force) and then wonder why apt-rpm isn’t upgrading things correctly.
Said cow orker knew that the package he was upgrading needs the CGI.pm perl package, so he put a “requires perl-CGI” in the rpm, because on the version of RedHat he has on his desktop, that’s where CGI.pm comes from. Only one problem with that – on the version our software is installed on, CGI.pm is actually part of the perl rpm itself. So his package wouldn’t upgrade, because the “requires perl-CGI” wasn’t satisfied and it wasn’t in the apt repository. So he went off to the web and grabbed a perl-CGI rpm from another distro and another version of perl, and tried to install it. That’s when rpm complained that the CGI.pm it was trying to install conflicted with the CGI.pm that was already installed by the perl rpm. So rather than saying “hmmm, it’s already installed”, he installed it with –force. And then came to me complaining that apt-get was “complaining about something being obsolete”.
I had to trek down to the basement to see the real message, and the real message was that this half-assed installed perl-CGI rpm was obsoleted by perl-5.8.3. And after scratching my head for a minute, I saw the offending “rpm -i –force” on another window.
Surprisingly, I let him live.
Move the coworker to India, and you’ve just discoved my life at work.
Surprisingly, I let him live.
The question is “why?” Of course, the more they screw up and the better you are at fixing the screwups, the more essential you are to the project, and that can only be good.