Re: confsued at behaviour of 'yum install/update' command

Robinson Tiemuqinke <[email protected]> writes:

> Hi, all,
>
>  These days I got confused at the 'yum install' and 'yum update' commands. The problem is described below:
>
>  Suppose there have been three packages: pkgA, pkgB, pkgC. Package pkgA depends on pkgB and pkgB depends on pkgC.
>
>  When 'yum install pkgA' runned at the first time, yum found and installed all three packages, pkgA and pkgB and pkgC at their newest version.

 Because nothing provides pkgB before pkgB is installed, pkgA needs
pkgB so some version of pkgB must be installed.

>  Then after some time, when all three packages have newer versions built, and 'yum update pkgA' command is carried out, only pkgA itself is updated to newest version, while pkgB and pkgC is still at old version untouched. 

 Now however pkgB is already installed, and pkgA-2 still only requires
pkgB not pkgB-2 ... so pkgB is not updated.
 "yum update" will update everything, as will changing the requires so
that pkgA requires pkgB-2 and not just pkgB.

> 'yum install pkgA' and 'yum upgrade pkgA' have no effects neither.
>
>  Any one can shed a light on this problem? Is there an option to turn on depending upgrade(pkgB), or even recursive dependency upgrade(pkgC)? Thanks a lot.

 No, and it would be a bad idea. For instance pretty much everything
requires /bin/sh, so any update would require an update of bash
... which would then require an update of everything that bash depends
on (etc. etc. etc.). At which point you might as well use "yum update"
on it's own.

 Also what do you do if you get new versions of pkgA and pkgC, do you
want "yum update pkgC" to be recursively updated still? ... at this
point it's going to behave even more like "yum update".

-- 
James Antill -- [email protected]