Fixing Installed Packages to a YUM Repository

In the history of gLite deployment due to various reasons it has been necessary to remove packages from the yum repositories after they have been released.

As a result it may be necessary to remove or downgrade packages that would not be installed if the system were to be reinstalled from the repositories.

The following is a recipe for downgrading or removing packages installed on SL4 that are not in the yum repositories.

Install repoquery

The repoquery is a command for extracting information from yum repositories. It is contained in the yum-utils package.

# yum install yum-utils

List of Installed Packages Not In Repositories.

# repoquery -a --nvr --pkgnarrow extras

shows a list of packages and versions that are installed but not in the repositories.

bouncycastle-jdk14-1.19-2
java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.13-5jpp
java-1.5.0-sun-devel-1.5.0.13-5jpp
j2sdk-1.4.2_08-fcs
dcache-client-1.8.0-0
perl-AppConfig-1.65-1.el4.rf

Determine Which Packages are in the YUM Repository

Use repoquery to see which packages are available at an older version in the repositories.

# repoquery --location bouncycastle-jdk14 java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0 \
                             java-1.5.0-sun-devel j2sdk dcache-client perl-AppConfig

produces results

http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/EGEE/gLite/R3.1/glite-UI/sl4/i386//RPMS.updates/dcache-client-1.7.0-35.i586.rpm

This lets you know that dcache-client is available at an older version and the other packages java-1.5.0-sun-devel, j2sdk are not in the repository at all.

The yumdownloader command can also be used.

# yumdownloader --urls bouncycastle-jdk14 java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0 \
                    java-1.5.0-sun-devel j2sdk dcache-client perl-AppConfig

which does much the same as above.

Download Older Version of Package

Use yumdownloader to download packages, this is in yum-utils as well.

#  yumdownloader dcache-client

Install Package

# rpm -Uvh --oldpackage  dcache-client-1.7.0-35.i586.rpm

Remove packages not in the Repository

Assuming you think it is a sensible idea.

# rpm -e java-1.5.0-sun-devel

of course it may be that you are expecting the package to be installed and not in a repository anyway.

-- SteveTraylen - 14 Dec 2007