[elrepo-devel] Updating of kmod packages is broken on el5.5

Phil Perry phil at elrepo.org
Wed May 19 19:00:45 EDT 2010


Hi all,

Unfortunately we have identified a bug in el5.5 that has caused updating 
of kmod packages to fail on el5.5.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=593504

Actually the above is a little unfair to our friends at Red Hat. We 
originally hacked kmodtool to allow our kmod packages to be updatable by 
yum - something kmodtool was never really designed to do. As it turns 
out, this hack only worked because of a bug in the weak-modules script, 
which was identified and fixed in RHEL-5.5. That fix in turn broke our 
hack with the net result being that updating any elrepo kmod on el5.5 
breaks the package (all weak links to the module are removed).

The workaround is not to update any kmods on el5.5 for the time being, 
but rather to uninstall the old version before installing the new version.

So, for example, if yum tells you there's an update available, then you 
could do:

yum erase kmod-foo
yum install kmod-foo

This should even work for network drivers as the old driver will remain 
loaded in the kernel even after uninstalling the old package.

We are currently working with the folks at Red Hat to resolve the issue, 
but until we have more information we may hold off pushing any new 
updates so as not to further exasperate the issue. Worse case scenario 
might be that any fix will only apply going forward and that all current 
packages will fail the first time they are updated until newer fixed 
versions can be released.

If anyone has any concerns or questions, please feel free to discuss 
them here.

Thanks.

Phil




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