RPM Obsoletes don't work like I want them to

[James Antill]

On Sat, 2010-01-30 at 15:45 -0600, Paul Johnson wrote:

[...]
> I want the rpm install of java-1.6.0-sun to remove the
> java-1.6.0-openjdk package.  I thought the SPEC option Obsoletes would
> get that. In my sun jdk spec file,  the top 100 lines of which I paste
> in below. I've done something wrong, because when I install those with
> the usual "rpm -ivh java-1.6.0-sun-1.6.0.18-2.0.Centos54kups.i586.rpm"
> then the openjdk packages are not removed.

 "rpm --install" is rarely the right thing to do, I don't know of any
higher level package manager which likes to have  two versions of the
same package. And, as you've found out, --install doesn't do obsoletes
processing ... which is often unwanted behaviour.

[...]
> Obsoletes:      javaws-menu
> Obsoletes:      java-1.6.0-openjdk

 Also, don't do unversioned obsoletes ... it always ends in pain.