[elrepo] RE driver update incompatibility issue

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 01/30/2013 03:50 PM, Phil Perry wrote:
> On 30/01/13 12:49, John Hodrien wrote:
>> On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
>>
>>> ok, so most of the package updates will happen when the "current" 
>>> driver
>>> gets updated.
>>> This mitigates the (slight) issue, but only for people with modern
>>> hardware (who use and want the updated "current" driver anyway). Users
>>> who are on a legacy version will still uselessly download a new package
>>> each time current gets updated.
>>>
>>> Nux mentioned deltarpm, fine for rhel6 but not for rhel5 afaik?
>>>
>>> Don't get me wrong, I think this is an enticing idea, and there's no
>>> issue for me since most of my machines are on fast networks. I'm just
>>> trying to think this through and imagine the potential drawbacks before
>>> you commit your precious time and energy to it :-)
>>
>> I might be thinking this wrong, so forgive me if I'm backwards here.
>>
>> Could the actual driver rpms be separate and not required by the
>> 'intelligent'
>> rpm? That way if you *knew* you wanted a particular driver, you could 
>> not
>> install the drivers you didn't need, but still install the intelligence,
>> so at
>> the very least it could alert you that you were missing a required
>> package for
>> your hardware. You could even include a command in that would remove the
>> unused packages, so that your kickstart could do a
>> nvidia-remove-unneeded in
>> %post. You could pair that with a meta-rpm that
>> simply required all packages, if you still wanted a single yum install
>> foo.rpm
>> that could install all the required bits.
>>
>
> Hi John,
>
> Yes, if we are going to do something of this nature then my 
> inclination is to go the individual package route and manage which 
> package gets installed from some script or meta package rather than 
> going the unified package route.
>
> The problem is that this is not easy to do within the conventional 
> tools that RPM and yum provide, and I'm not aware of any precedent for 
> doing so, which means we would have to invent a mechanism for handling 
> this. I don't see how it can be simply done with Requires and/or RPM 
> scriptlets, but maybe there's a way things could be made to work by 
> adding package excludes to the yum config file. But it all starts to 
> get a bit messy at which point it's also going to start to get a bit 
> unreliable and we really don't want unreliable on Enterprise Linux.
>
> If someone can come up with a mechanism as to how this could be made 
> to work then I'll certainly look at it.
>
> To illustrate some of the difficulties:
>
> You can't use scripted Requires, and those are defined on the build 
> host not on the end users system.
>
> You can't install everything and then remove the bits you don't want 
> as there are file conflicts within the individual packages and it's 
> difficult to control the order in which packages will be installed or 
> removed when there are multiple (more than 2) packages involved.
>
> I have no idea if you can call 'yum' from within a yum transaction, 
> but I very much doubt it as the rpm database has to be locked during 
> the transaction.
You can't. Just like you cannot invoke rpm from rpm scriptlets.