[Bda] Fedora, c'est bien, mangez-en (plein plein)

[Jérôme Petazzoni]

Lu dans le LWN du 13 juillet :

[...]

One of the endearing features of Fedora Development on x86-64 is that
the chances of running "yum update" successfully at any given time tend
to be less than 50% - especially if the system has any packages from
Extras installed. Between dependency hassles and travel, this particular
system had not been updated in some time. Your editor finally broke
down, deleted a few packages which were blocking the update, and set off
on what looked like a plausible attempt to catch up to the leading edge.
After a quick check of the current backups, your editor fired off the
"yum update" command.

After thinking at length and forcing every other process out to swap in
the way only yum can do, the word came back: the system could be
updated, at the cost of downloading some 420 packages. Installing that
many potentially unstable packages onto an important system requires a
significant girding of loins - a state of preparedness which can be
difficult to maintain while waiting for all those packages to download
from the (not particularly speedy) mirror network. Once that process
completed, yum had another long think, then announced a file conflict:
/usr/bin/oowriter from openoffice.org-writer-2.0.3-7 conflicted with the
same file in openoffice.org-writer-2.0.3-5.

Yum, of course, refused to update the system. That much is
understandable, but its subsequent decision to delete all 420 downloaded
(but uninstalled) packages can only be seen as gratuitous and mean-spirited.

To the uninitiated, it would appear that yum is complaining about a
package conflicting with itself. Experienced Fedora x86-64 users,
however, recognize the problem immediately: the x86-64 and i386 versions
of the same package are refusing to play well together. [...]