Category: Geekery

Can I just digress for a moment?

I just want to say that I HATE HATE HATE rpm and it’s fucking broken dependency checking?

At work, we use apt-rpm so that we have a hope in hell of dependencies being satisfied when we install stuff. Our previous build of our software uses the RHEL 4.3 default version of dnotify, 0.17.2-1, but our current build needs a version we got from somewhere else, which is version 0.18.0-1. So I dutifully changed the

Requires: dnotify

to

Requires: dnotify >= 0.18

But it doesn’t matter whether I install it using “rpm -Uvh foo” or “apt-get install foo”, it happily installs the latest version of our stuff without complaining about unmet dependencies or attempting to upgrade dnotify. WTF? I tried with “0.18”, “0.18.0” and “0.18.0-1”, all with no effect.

I did verify with “rpm -q -provides” and “rpm -q -requires” that the version numbers internal to the rpms in question agree with the file name versions and the dependencies made it into the rpm. So it’s not a case of a file “dnotify-0.18.0-1.rpm” that internally thinks it’s dnotify version 0.01 or something stupid like that. It’s just fucking rpm being fucking brain dead.

So far so good

The upgrade went as well as can be expected.

The libata business didn’t cause too much trouble. Most of the entries in /etc/fstab used labels rather than device names, so I only had to fix the entries for the swap space and the CD-ROM and DVD burner. I had to fix some entries in /etc/munin/plugins.

Postgres stubbornly refuses to upgrade as always, so I’m going to have to blow the data files away and restore from last night’s nightly backup.

The nightly backup ran twice for some reason, but that might be because I rebooted sometime around midnight. Unfortunately the two runs kind of stepped on each other so I’m running it again now.

NUT (the UPS tools) fails with some problem with a missing file.

I had to uninstall bind-utils for some reason, and now I can’t reinstall it because bind-libs is 9.4.1.-5.fc7 but bind-utils requires 9.4.1.-4.fc7. Hopefully somebody on the Fedora Project will fix that little stupidity. Oh what do you know, it’s fixed now.

Another yum dependency issue I was having last night with “yum groupupdate Base” also seems to have fixed itself this morning.

My Sun JDK rpm got uninstalled somehow.

I had to re-install rawdog (with “python setup.py install”).

I can’t understand why files that I never touch in the fonts area end up getting new identical copies as .rpmnew files. RPM should be smarter about that.

So, not too much to fix. And in return, X is working again, I’m not stuck on an obsolete version of Fedora, and maybe I’ll start getting updates again.

One of these days I’m hoping to move to something Debian based so these upgrades will be less painful.