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

[Jonathan Buzzard]

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