Annoyances: March 2008 Archives

I had an interesting issue today where up2date was complaining because a package was already installed. The error showed up as follows:

Fetching Obsoletes list for channel: rhel-i386-es-4...

Fetching rpm headers...
########################################

Name                                    Version        Rel     
----------------------------------------------------------
e2fsprogs-devel                         1.35           12.11.el46.1     i386  
gd                                      2.0.28         5.4E.el46.1      i386  
krb5-devel                              1.3.4          54                i386  
krb5-libs                               1.3.4          54                i386  
openssl                                 0.9.7a         43.17.el46.1     i386  
openssl-devel                           0.9.7a         43.17.el46.1     i386  
perl                                    5.8.5          36.el45.2        i386  
tzdata                                  2007k          2.el4             noarch


Testing package set / solving RPM inter-dependencies...
########################################
RPM package conflict error.  The message was:
Test install failed because of package conflicts:
package perl-5.8.5-36.el45.2 is already installed

Running "up2date -u --force" just gave me the same error. The eventual solution after much head scratching and wandering down deadends was to run the following commands:

up2date --get perl
rpm -Uvh --force perl-5.8.5-36.el4_5.2.i386.rpm

Once this was finish, "up2date -u" happily went about it's business again.