[elrepo] RE driver update incompatibility issue

[Phil Perry]

On 25/01/13 23:13, Lamar Owen wrote:
>
> On Jan 25, 2013, at 4:03 PM, Nux! wrote:
>
>> - why not in cases like this send a Requires for some noarch that executes a script and does a "yum replace"[1] based on pci id?
>>
>> How does that sound?
>>
>> [1] - http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/6/SRPMS/yum-plugin-replace-0.2.5-1.ius.el6.src.rpm
>
> Ah!  It _does_ exist!
>
> Having gone through the 173.xx before, and now 304xx with three separate boxes, this would be very nice, IMO.
>
> As it was,  I had several packages that required nvidia-x11-drv installed, and had to reinstall them as well when 'crossgrading' from nvidia-x11-drv to nvidia-x11-drv-304xx and friends.
>

Hi Nux, Lamar,

Thanks for the suggestions. I apologize, I've just got back from a 
weekend away so haven't yet had time to look at it in any detail.

But, if I understand correctly, the above yum plugin allows one to do 
something like 'yum replace pkg1 --replace-with pkg2'.

This requires two additional packages to be installed - the noarch 
containing the script and the yum replace plugin.

Is yum replace really needed? Couldn't one just do:

yum erase --nodeps kmod-nvidia nvidia-x11-drv
yum install kmod-nvidia-304xx nvidia-x11-drv-304xx

which should achieve the same thing?

Anyway, my main concern here is that we over complicate matters looking 
for a solution to a problem that arises very infrequently (~ every 5 
years based on the last legacy release?) and is relatively easy to 
resolve when it does arise - i.e, it's easy to yum downgrade or yum 
erase and yum install the previous version.

I think the main issue here is that some folks have a tendency to 
install and forget stuff on their systems and then rather than taking at 
least some responsibility for maintaining what they've installed from 
3rd party repo's choose to blame everyone but themselves when something 
goes wrong. I'm not keen on us reacting to solve a problem that only 
exists in the minds of those who scream loudest. If OTOH you can 
persuade me it's a really elegant solution then I might be more inclined 
to buy into the idea, but ATM I'm leaning the other way towards the less 
is more school of packaging.

On a technical level, I'm still trying to get my head around how Nux's 
suggestion might work. Once a yum transaction is underway we seem fairly 
limited in what we can do.

Originally I decided against echoing a warning to the console as I felt 
this was little more than repeating the warning the driver already logs 
to /var/log/messages, but in hind sight this might not have been such a 
bad idea. We could put a script in %post to check compatibility and echo 
a recommendation for the correct legacy driver together with a link to 
the url for the relevant documentation.

But lets discuss it some more as at the very least it's an interesting 
packaging challenge :-)

Phil