ES3 update 8 has severe problems with "pvm"

On any server with the "pvm" package installed, which seems to creep
in by default, running "up2date -u" on 2006-July-20 dies with the
message:

  error: unpacking of archive failed on file
    /usr/share/pvm3/bin/LINUXI386: cpio:  rename failed - Is a directory

This leaves the system in a very unfortunate state, with the updates
partially applied, and about 50 RPM's missing in action, including
rather important things such as "openssh-server".  With a lot of
hand work using "rpm", 'find ... -name "*.rpm*" -print' and the like I
was able to get a couple of systems past that.  Examples of the kind
of things that helped me the most are:

   # clean large objects out of /usr to avoid undue *.rpmnew files
   # and /usr mis-estimates of available space
   # people who use them reinstall with rpm -i or up2date afterwards

   rpm -e psgml apel-xemacs emacs emacs-leim  xemacs xemacs-el \
     xemacs-info openoffice.org openoffice.org-i18n openoffice.org-libs

In a fairly clean /var/spool/up2date or other hand directory with
only the downloaded update 8 rpm files:

  rm pvm*
  rpm -Fvh --force up2date*rpm rpm*rpm
  rm up2date* rpm*
  rpm -Fvh kernel-{util,doc,source}*rpm
  rm kernel-{util,doc,source}*rpm
  rpm -Uvh --force *.rpm
  up2date -p
  up2date kernel-utils kernel  # or kernel-smp, or whatever

This may leave you with about 900 *.rpmorig or *.rpmnew conflicts to
resolve, particularly if you have squid installed, but less than a
dozen are real, so doing something like:

  find /etc /usr -type f -ctime -1 -name "*.rpm*" -print |
   while read f; do if cmp -s $f ${f%.rpm*}; then rm $f; fi; done

may improve the situation a lot.

   
a) is anyone else having this problem?


b) BEWARE!  You probably want to avoid running "up2date" on systems
with "pvm" installed unless you are a masochist.


c) applying update 8 using Redhat Network went very smoothly for me on
a system which didn't have "pvm" installed.

I note that 
   rpm -q --whatrequires pvm
didn't suggest any dependencies, so those of us not doing parallel
distributed programming may want to do "rpm -e pvm; up2date -p" as
a workaround before trying to apply update 8.

-- James E. Leinweber
Public Health Informatics, State Lab of Hygiene, University of Wisconsin
<jiml-qDHGe9P1N6L2fBVCVOL8/[email protected]> 2811 Agriculture DR, Madison WI, US; +1 608 221 6281
PGP fp: 5C6BC8B9  fp: 2E36 47BC DB03 57CE 86AD  19CC 41A1 9179 5C6B C8B9

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