On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Dridi Boukelmoune dridi.boukelmoune@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:04 AM, Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler@chello.at wrote:
Bill Nottingham wrote:
Matthew Miller (mattdm@fedoraproject.org) said:
I'm a little lost in the thread, but do you mean that yum's protected packages functionality is undocumented? If that is what you mean, check the man page. It says:
protected_packages This is a list of packages that yum should never completely remove. They are protected via Obsoletes as well as user/plugin removals.
The default is: yum glob:/etc/yum/protected.d/*.conf So any packages which should be protected can do so by including a file in /etc/yum/protected.d with their package name in it.
Also if this configuration is set to anything, then yum will protect the package corresponding to the running version of the kernel.
While documented, I do find this last bit of behavior extremely odd and non-intuitive. (And hardcoded, no less.)
There should just be a separate protect_running_kernel boolean option, which would default to the above odd behavior for compatibility if not set (but explicitly setting it to either 1 or 0 would override that either way).
Can't the kernel package itself do that ?
I'm thinking about the %preun section (maybe %pretrans ?) where the package would know it's being removed, and could find out whether it's the running kernel.
One might also want to build a distribution on top of yum/rpm but choose a different name for the kernel package like "linux" or "linux-kernel".
This reminds me that yum is built on top of rpm, and rpm doesn't mean linux. I remember my first time on AIX, and the surprising (yet unpleasant) fact that I had to use (a very old version of) rpm.
From rpm.org: RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Fedora Project, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, CentOS, Meego, Mageia and many others.
It is also used on many other operating systems as well
From rpm5.org: But RPM is also used for software packaging on many other Unix operating systems like FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris, IBM AIX and Apple Mac OS X through the cross-platform Unix software distribution OpenPKG.
I actually remember a comparison matrix of OpenSolaris forks, some of them chose /rpm5?/ for package management, but I can't find a link.
I do understand why people would want such features built-in, but it seems a bit short-sighted. And by short-sighted I don't mean a bad idea, I mean restricted to Fedora/RHEL and very close distributions. I don't know yum's goals, but the man page yum(8) and the faq don''t seem to mention any tight coupling to rhel-like linux distribution. Again, I'm not saying this would be a bad thing. AFAICT yum is tied *by essence* to rhel, but I'm also wondering what upstream thinks about portability, because the whole kernel issue is a portability no-no.
Dridi
Kevin Kofler
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