On 27/10/2007, Claude Jones <cjones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Hyperbole. > > > that's a high horse you ride Why? In the context of this thread, the recommendation not to use "yum -y" is beyond my comprehension. With dozens of updates every week, the Fedora Project is doing a disservice if the users are expected to decide themselves if any update package (or combination of multiple updates) is bad, if the users are expected to decide on that prior to installing an update set, and if updates can be disastrous. Perhaps some users would find it suspicious if yum said it wants to remove packages "rpm, rpm-python, yum" without mentioning any obvious replacements. But that's a very weird scenario. The OP has lost yum, rpm, possibly together with parts of the RPM database. Mission objective is to find out how that has happened. > > The "(y/n)?" check during a pretty normal "yum -y update" > > comes very early, even before downloading the packages and > > also prior to the crucial transaction check. It is safe to use > > the normal "yum -y update" mode, provided that yum doesn't > > suffer from a serious bug. > > indeed... > > there was one of those as I recall in the past months, though the > details escape my memory at the moment Stock Fedora 7 included a Yum that installed packages without resolving all dependencies, resulting in a multitude of problems at run-time. Lots of bug reports. Lots of users that haven't had any chance to notice any problem prior to the y/n confirmation, because it isn't easy to notice such a problem. Even for very experienced users it would be very unlikely that they could notice a problem like that without examining packages at a lower level before installing them. > there have been many reportings of issues with automated > updating - it is not easy, but, it is possible to do things that > will cause disaster even on updates -- read all the 'helpful' > posts out there about enabling/disabling repos using text > editing, for example - enable rawhide and forgot to turn it back > off using such techniques, and see what can happen... Congratulations for finding a single case where a messed up Yum configuration file would result in an unattended distribution upgrade. ;) Seriously, one of the primary reasons why people shoot themselves into their feet is that they don't put to good effect a (y/n) confirmation prompt. I've given "rpm --force ..." and "rpm --nodeps ..." as very good examples already. There are many other even more dangerous commands. I've seen users who have removed important files of their RPM database after they had been told to do just "rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*" (and yes, by default there is an interactive alias for rm).
