Any way to remove an installed package from the RPM database?

[Florian Festi]

On 03/15/2016 11:27 AM, Florian Festi wrote:
> On 03/15/2016 03:26 AM, Stuart Gathman wrote:
>> On 03/14/2016 08:45 PM, Jon Danniken wrote:
>>> Hello list,
>>>
>>> I have a package which I modified from the src.rpm and installed via RPM.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, when I attempt to update my Fedora system (using dnf), it
>>> offers to update my modified version of the application which brings in
>>> several packages which conflict on my system.
>>>
>>> Is there any way to remove my modified application from the RPM database
>>> without uninstalling it?  Conversely, is there any way to install an RPM
>>> package without having it being added to the database?
>> Use  exclude= in your dnf.conf to prevent updating that package. Works
>> for yum also.
> 
> Another solution is the Epoch: tag. It is used in version comparisons
> even before the version. So setting the epoch to a number higher of the
> Fedora package (No Epoch is treated as 0) will make all Fedora updates
> "older" that your modified package. To be on the save side you could
> increase the Epoch by more than one.


To elaborate on this a bit:

The benefit of using the Epoch tag is that it does not depend on a
specific configuration of the local yum/dnf instances but has this
behavior embedded directly in the package itself. That way you could
just offer your own local yum repositories to your machines and they
would automatically update to your modified package without any special
interaction. This is especially useful if you update your modified
package more often or have multiple machines that need modified packages.

See createrepo and yum.conf/dnf.conf man pages for the details.

Florian

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