building a package that can not be upgraded

[Stuart D Gathman]

On 07/05/2012 05:09 PM, Valery Reznic expounded in part:
> You can write pre-install script that check number of installed 
> package instances ($1, iirc) and if
> package already installed, then exit with error message and non-zero 
> status.
>
> But why do you want to do such a thing?
>
Like /dev/null and /dev/full, such boundary conditions often have uses.  
For instance, how about an RPM package that can't be *installed*?  Why 
would you want such an apparently useless thing?  Well, right off, I 
could see it being useful in some repository to replace a broken package 
- effectively also preventing anything depending on it from being 
installed with a clean error.  (Although simply removing the broken 
package from yum repo results in a reasonable error message.)

In fact, the use case for "can't be upgraded" in this instance is a 
broken package.  Eventually, the package will be fixed, and *then* you 
will want to upgrade it.  So maybe you want to create a new release of 
the current (broken) version that can't be installed.  That will prevent 
updates with yum until you get it fixed.
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