ius-community team mailing list archive

[BJ Dierkes <wdierkes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As is documented in a number of places (soon to be removed though), IUS packages introduced an incompatibility with how Yum handled compare_providers.  The issue is outlined in LP#453543 [1].  That said, as of upstream version 3.2.26 [2] and RHEL 5.5/6.0 (backported: 3.2.22-23) Yum now better supports the IUS package naming convention.

In short, IUS names its packages slightly off from stock package names.  For example, mysql becomes mysql50 or mysql51... php becomes php52 or php53, etc.  The reason is outlined in FAQ #1098 [3].  This introduced a dependency issue where if you tried to install a package that say "Requires: php-mysql" ... if you had php52 installed, yum would previously attempt to install stock php-mysql  rather than the more appropriate php52-mysql.  As of the latest release, Yum now checks to see if a providers 'base package' is installed, and if so awards it points in the comparison process.  This makes php52-mysql win out as a better provider for the dependency 'php-mysql' becuase it a) provides php-mysql and b) it's base package (php52) is already installed.  Does that sound confusing?

Many thanks to the Yum developers for accepting our request and helping make IUS the best 3rd party repo for upgrading RHEL!

References: 

	[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ius/+bug/453543
	[2] http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/whatsnew/3.2.26
	[3] https://answers.launchpad.net/ius/+faq/1098


That said, we previously implemented a 'yum3' package, which offered a work around to the aforementioned issues.  I'm happy to say that we will be removing the yum3 package and encourage everyone to revert their yum3 packages [if installed] to stock yum >= 3.2.22-23.  This can be done by the following:

# yum install yum-utils

# yumdownloader yum

# rpm -e --nodeps yum3

# rpm -Uvh yum-*.rpm
 

Please let us know if you have any questions.

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BJ Dierkes
Linux Systems Engineer IV / [RH]acker
Infrastructure Services [Development]
Rackspace Hosting