[ale] My yum broke again and I can't fix it this time

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 03/20/2013 10:48 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Did you replace the default gnome environment? It still looks like
> someone screwed the dependencies of the group. Those packages require a
> desktop environment. Unless the mate overwrote all the crap in the rpmdb
> (smack the package maintainer for a screwup of colossal proportions) it
> should just uninstall with the groupremove as you tried.

I didn't remove any of GNOME's packages or anything, just installed the 
new stuff.

> try just removing the desktop manager application of mate using yum
> remove foo instead of groupremove. You can add a few
> --exclude=<package-to-keep> exceptions to prevent total calamity.

I did find some more interesting things while I was poking through the 
documentation to fix my system.  Just after I'd sent the previous email, 
I found "group info", which I used to list the components of the "MATE 
Desktop" group.  I found another group called (heh!) "mate-desktop".

So, I tried a "yum group remove mate-desktop", which appeared to be much 
more restrictive though it still sucked out a lot of packages.  But, it 
didn't try to remove glibc or anything like that, thankfully.

I looked over the list and told yum to go ahead.

About a minute later, my X session crashed.  Oops.  That's right, modern 
software doesn't like it when things on the disk change drastically.

Well, that killed yum, too.  Double-oops.

So I thought "okay, I'll re-run the command", which helpfully told me to 
"yum-complete-transaction" instead.  So I did that.

Alright.  At this point, MATE, GNOME, X, and several other things have 
been removed.  Yuck.  So, I tried "yum group install 'GNOME Desktop'", 
which took a few seconds, displayed the to-be-installed list of packages 
as usual, and then the prompt.  I told it to go ahead and install, and 
then it bombed with a transaction check failure (I didn't take a picture 
of it, but it involved 4 packages that "are already installed", 
including kbd).

So I removed those four packages and tried again, and it worked.

Then I had to re-install the Cinnamon Desktop group, because that also 
got removed.

After having done all that, when I attempt to remove "Cinnamon Desktop", 
the package manager _still_ goes nutso and tries to remove the whole world.

I don't think that functionality works as it is supposed to...

> OR - try a yum groupinstall GNOME (or whatever it's called) then
> groupremove mate. Basically try and rewrite the deps tree so mate is
> disconnected.

Let me know if I'm wrong, but didn't I effectively do that when I 
reinstalled GNOME and Cinnamon in my effort to get a working display?  :-)

And if so, how did such a problem make its way into the Fedora core 
repositories?

I really do like this distribution, though, package manager and its 
front-ends aside...

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch, President
Naunet Corporation

Telephone: (678) 287-0693 x130
Toll-free: (888) 494-5810 x130
FAX: (678) 287-0693