ius-community team mailing list archive

[Carl George <carl.george@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Howdy IUS community,

Today I was reading about upcoming changes in dnf [0], and I stumbled across a current feature of yum I had not seen before called "swap".  It is available on RHEL/Centos 7.  From the man page:

    At it's simplest this is just a simpler way to remove one set of package(s) and
    install another set of package(s) without having to use the "shell" command.
    However you can specify different commands to call than just remove or install,
    and you can list multiple packages (it splits using the "--" marker).  Note that
    option parsing will remove the first "--" in an argument list on the command line.

Here are some IUS-specific examples.

    yum swap rsync rsync31u
    yum swap -- remove php{,-cli,-common} -- install php56u{,-cli,-common}

After some basic testing this functionality seems robust and easy to use.  We currently maintain the yum-plugin-replace package [1].  The yum swap command appears to have the potential to obsolete this plugin on EL7.  Since the feature doesn't exist on EL5 or EL6, we would of course continue to maintain the plugin for those releases.

Has anyone used yum swap before?  Has anyone run into issues with it?  We are considering updating our documentation to make this the recommended method for installing IUS packages on EL7.

- Carl

[0] http://dnf.readthedocs.org/en/latest/cli_vs_yum.html#packages-replacement-without-yum-shell-or-yum-swap
[1] https://iuscommunity.org/pages/IUSClientUsageGuide.html#upgrading-stock-rhel-packages-to-ius-packages