Re: [SLUG] How to install about 150 rpms? On 11 Feb, Tom Massey replied to: > > 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.
Looks like Tom was 100% right. I now have a bunch of programs that are running, but almost any other program will dump core. Including things like su or login. ldconfig reported that /usr/bin/libglib.so didn't exist, for example, so I think I'm screwed. Although I'm logged in, and even have a root shell, I suspect things are too broken to recover from easily. Will I have to re-install? I'm running RH 7.1; perhaps a way to recover would be to get a RH 7.2 CD and upgrade? I also have a Tom's root boot disc, and also one of those Linuxcare recovery CD-ettes (v 1.2). But I'm just hanging back from shutting down until I get some advice. Pity I hadn't hung back from doing the rpm forcing. Live and learn. Any advice? luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
