On Mon, Feb 11, 2002 at 12:30:02AM +1100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On 10 Feb, Jeff Waugh wrote: > > > So my question is, is there a utility that will work out which rpm files > > > provide which dependencies, and work out the order to install them all? > > > It would be less tedious than compiling from source, to work out by hand > > > what the right install order would be, but surely this must be a common > > > problem? > > > > If you want to install all of them, can't you just do rpm -Uvh * and it > > will work it out? > > Nope. It would be sensible if it did, though, wouldn't it?
Yes. Are you sure that it doesn't? > rpm -Uvh *.rpm > error: failed dependencies: All these (I think) are saying that you don't have the required dependencies installed on your system, and that the packages included in *.rpm also don't satisfy the dependencies. You need to upgrade to the versions listed, or some things won't work. > Kevin Waterson wrote: > > > if you do rpm -Uvh *.rpm you may find dependacy problems as it will > > try to install them in order, I think this is a bit mistaken - rpm should look through all the packages given to it for dependencies before it begins the install, and abort if failed dependencies are found. This means that if you get dependency problems, the rpm packages will not install properly. You can force the install, but that doesn't get around the problem of failed dependencies - there's still going to be software that depends on other software that is either not installed or not up to the version required by the package you are trying to install. This is a Bad Thing. > > but if you do > > rpm -Uvh *.rpm --nodeps --force > > this will install them all without any issues with dependancies,but > > forcing them is not always a good idea. > > Well, I feel like taking a gamble and seeing whether this breaks my > entire system or not, so I'll try it.... Um, that may not be a great idea. This assumes that the packages you have in your temporary directory fulfil all the requirements that all the other packages in that directory depend on. This may not be the case. Generally it's safer in this situation to do an rpm -Uvh *.rpm and try and fulfil the dependencies that rpm complains about before you start playing with --force or --nodeps. Searching on <http://rpmfind.net> can often find rpms that satisfy these dependencies. As a generality, with an rpm based system, if you find yourself using --nodeps or --force, you've probably done something wrong. Those options should really only be used, for example, by people who've installed the needed dependencies from source and so skipped adding them to the rpm database. There are reasons that rpm's have dependencies, there are reasons that the rpm program has --nodeps and --force flags. Installing potentially unstable software is not one of them. Well, actually it is. But only if you're willing to poke at the instability until it becomes at least as stable as a badly cooked blancmange. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
