[gpfsug-discuss] How to install efix with yum ?

[Sanchez, Paul]

This reminds me that there is one more thing which drives the convoluted process I described earlier…

Automation.  Deployment solutions which use yum to build new hosts are often the place where one notices the problem.  They would need to determine that they should install both the base-version and efix RPMS and in that order.  IIRC, there were no RPM dependencies connecting the  efix RPMs to their base-version equivalents, so there was nothing to signal YUM that installing the efix requires that the base-version be installed first.

(Our particular case is worse than just this though, since we prohibit installing two versions/releases for the same (non-kernel) package name.  But that’s not the case for everyone.)

-Paul

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Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] How to install efix with yum ?


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>> I don't see any yum options which match rpm's '--force' option.
Actually, you do not need to use --force option since efix RPMs have incremental efix number in rpm name.

Efix package provides update RPMs to be installed on top of corresponding PTF GA version. When you install 5.0.4.1 efix9, if 5.0.4.1 is already installed on your system, "yum update" should work.

Regards, The Spectrum Scale (GPFS) team

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[Inactive hide details for Jonathan Buzzard ---01/15/2020 02:09:33 PM---On 15/01/2020 18:30, Sanchez, Paul wrote: > Yum generall]Jonathan Buzzard ---01/15/2020 02:09:33 PM---On 15/01/2020 18:30, Sanchez, Paul wrote: > Yum generally only wants there to be single version of a

From: Jonathan Buzzard <jonathan.buzzard at strath.ac.uk<mailto:jonathan.buzzard at strath.ac.uk>>
To: "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org<mailto:gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org<mailto:gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>>
Date: 01/15/2020 02:09 PM
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [gpfsug-discuss] How to install efix with yum ?
Sent by: gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org<mailto:gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org>

________________________________



On 15/01/2020 18:30, Sanchez, Paul wrote:
> Yum generally only wants there to be single version of any package (it
> is trying to eliminate conflicting provides/depends so that all of the
> packaging requirements are satisfied).  So this alien packaging practice
> of installing an efix version of a package over the top of the base
> version is not compatible with yum.

I would at this juncture note that IBM should be appending the efix
number to the RPM so that for example

    gpfs.base-5.0.4-1 becomes gpfs.base-5.0.4-1efix9

which would firstly make the problem go away, and second would allow one
to know which version of GPFS you happen to have installed on a node
without doing some sort of voodoo.

>
> The real issue for draconian sysadmins like us (whose systems must use
> and obey yum) is that there are files (*liblum.so) which are provided by
> the non-efix RPMS, but are not owned by the packages according to the
> RPM database since they’re purposefully installed outside of RPM’s
> tracking mechanism.
>

It worse than that because if you install the RPM directly yum/dnf then
start bitching about the RPM database being modified outside of
themselves and all sorts of useful information gets lost when you purge
the package installation history to make the error go away.

> We work around this by repackaging the three affected RPMS to include
> the orphaned files from the original RPMs (and eliminating the related
> but problematic checks from the RPMs’ scripts) so that our efix RPMs
> have been “un-efix-ified” and will install as expected when using ‘yum
> upgrade’.  To my knowledge no one’s published a way to do this, so we
> all just have to figure this out and run rpmrebuild for ourselves.
>

IBM should be hanging their heads in shame if the replacement RPM is
missing files.

JAB.

--
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG
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