Re: updating to one multiple package versions

On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 17:07 -0500, David Ressman wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've been looking through the archives for quite some time and haven't 
> been able to answer my question, so I thought I'd ask the list. Here's a 
> little bit of background about my setup and about what I'm trying to 
> accomplish:
> 
> For various and unpleasant reasons, I'm mirroring the up2date service 
> for RHEL4 to yum (2.6.1). Functionally speaking, it's set up identically 
> to the Fedora yum repositories; I've got a "base" repository with the 
> packages from the original distribution, and whenever I run up2date on 
> the yum server, it downloads the new RPMs into the "updates" repository 
> and rebuilds the "updates" repo metadata.
> 
> My problem is that I'd like to be able to upgrade to any version of a 
> particular package from a lesser version of that package, and not 
> necessarily the newest version of the package. Here's an example of what 
> I'm talking about:
> 
> RHAS4(u4) ships with version qt-3.3.3-9.3.x86_64. Since the OS release, 
> qt has been updated to qt-3.3.3-10.RHEL4.x86_64 and then again to 
> qt-3.3.3-11.RHEL4.x86_64. As it is now, I've got both of the new qt RPMs 
> in the updates directory, and the yum metadata files are built accordingly.
> 
> If I'm on a box with qt-3.3.3-9.3.x86_64 installed, and I want to go to 
> qt-3.3.3-11.RHEL4.x86_64, I can do the following:
> 
>    yum install qt-3.3.3-11.RHEL4.x86_64
>    yum update qt.x86_64
>    etc., etc.
> 
> What I can't figure out how to do is to upgrade to 
> qt-3.3.3-10.RHEL4.x86_64 once qt-3.3.3-11.RHEL4.x86_64 is added to the 
> repository. If I do "yum install qt-3.3.3-10.RHEL4.x86_64" or something 
> similar, I get the "Could not find update match for 
> qt-3.3.3-10.RHEL4.x86_64" error from cli.py.
> 
> After some digging around, I see that yum is being returned only the 
> newest version of the qt utility from a call to 
> rpmUtils.updates.reduceListNewestByNameArch.
> 
> Because of that, this behavior seems very deeply rooted in the yum 
> update function, and it looks to me like there's not a particularly easy 
> way to do what I want. If I specifically exclude 
> "qt-3.3.3-11.RHEL4.x86_64" on the yum command line, 
> reduceListNewestByNameArch() returns the one I want, but this is very 
> cumbersome. I don't really want to have to specifically exclude every 
> package version that's newer than the one to which I want to upgrade.
> 
> Obviously, if I remove qt and then run a "yum install 
> qt-3.3.3-10.RHEL4.x86_64", it works fine, but that's not a very robust 
> way to upgrade RPMs.
> 
> Is this a problem that other people have dealt with? I looked to see if 
> there's something in yum 3.x that would help me out (I'm not really 
> anxious to upgrade from 2.6), but I don't see anything. Am I stuck with 
> specifically excluding every other version of the package that happens 
> to be in the "updates" repo? Is there something simple I'm missing?

Short answer:
 Yes - it doesn't do that for updates.
Longer answer:
 It's something I think it should do and I've put it on the todo list.
When and how it gets fixed I'm not sure of at this moment - but it is on
the todo list:

http://wiki.linux.duke.edu/YumTodo

thanks
-sv