remove an installed rpm during rpm -i

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, devzero2000 wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 8:36 PM, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org>
> wrote:
> 
>
>       On Mon, 24 Nov 2008, Valery Reznic wrote:
>
>       > Did you try to use Obsolete tag ?
>       >
> 
> a couple of things about the whole thread
> 
> 1. obsolete does not work when you're rpm -i'ing pkgs. Only rpm -U
> 
> 2. modifying the rpmdb from a %post or %pre is an unsafe idea and
> prone to
> causing things to "end badly".
> 
> 
> It depends. If Jeff tell it is possible to have an "RPM bundle" (e.g. an
> rpm that install rpm(s) itself) then perhaps
> it is not so unsafe in first place. I personally have written un rpm that
> use yum for pull update.

It "works", except when it doesn't. If you can make sure the bundle is 
only ever installed in a transaction of it's own, without --root, it'll 
probably work just fine. But "rpm from within rpm" does break in some 
cases, for example certain chroot install scenarios and more esoteric 
cases such as glibc futex implementation changing in the same transaction.
And the breakage will always happen when you least expect it ;)

 	- Panu -