[elrepo] Update dependecy error

[Phil Perry]

On 19/06/2020 11:08, Georgios Papaioannou wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I am getting the following message at yum update on Centos:
> 
> /[elrepo]: 90 kmod packages excluded due to dependency errors
> /
> /
> /
> Can anyone help me resolve this? Is this a general Centos dependency 
> error or something related to elrerpo?
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Georgios
> 

Hi Georgios,

That message is for information only. If you run yum with '-d 3' to 
increase the debug verbosity you will see the list of packages that have 
been excluded.

The message comes from the yum-plugin-elrepo package. The purpose of the 
package is to exclude elrepo kmod packages from yum where there are 
dependency issues. Each kmod package is built against a specific kernel 
and will be compatible with a series of kernels. If a compatible kernel 
isn't instaled or available to install, trying to update that package 
will cause yum to fail with a dependency error. So rather than have yum 
fail, the plugin excludes those packages.

This often happens for CentOS users between point releases when CentOS 
lags behind RHEL. For example, if a kmod package gets rebuild for 
rhel-7.8 and is dependent on the rhel-7.8 kernel, CentOS users who are 
still on 7.7 would get dependency errors every time they run yum update 
because the kmod package they are trying to update requires a kernel 
that is not yet available. This is the issue the plugin fixes. Once your 
system is fully updated, you should not see any excluded packages.

In your case, with 90 kmod packages excluded, I'm assuming you are a 
CentOS user. The reason the package count is so high is that CentOS 
repos are configured such that you only have the most recent point 
release series kernels available to yum, so all the older packages in 
the repo which were built against older kernels (pre 7.8) have failed 
dependencies as their respective kernels are missing. You can resolve 
this (and make your CentOS install behave more like RHEL) by enabling 
the vault repo which you fix the dependency issues causing the package 
exclusions, but it's not critical. See this bug:

https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=15476

With CentOS vault enabled (or on RHEL), you should not see any package 
exclusions on a fully updated system.

Hope that makes sense.

Phil