How to force yum to reinstall a package...

wizard · #1 6th August 2006, 03:04 PM

Tripped over this little trick yesterday when a power failure took out libXext and killed gnome and xfce and seriously broke KDE.

Anyway, what you do is remove the package from the rpm database like this:

Code:

rpm -e --justdb --nodeps packagename

then you can use yum to reinstall the package

Zigzagcom · #2 14th May 2008, 06:53 AM

Thanks,
one never knows when the search function comes in handy! I have had segmentation faults when using "netstat" and wanted to remove it, but it would have removed all kinds of other stuff (dependencies),
so I used the above command and reinstalled the "net-tools" package with yum....all is well again.

evanfrey · #3 23rd June 2008, 02:09 PM

http://linux.die.net/man/1/yumdownloader

Jman · #4 25th June 2008, 06:15 PM

Some explanation is needed.

--justdb will only update the installed lists in the rpmdb, and not remove any files.

--nodeps will not process dependencies. I normally consider --nodeps to be evil as it can seriously break things by forcing their removal.

yum will never do the equivalent of either of these operations because yum doesn't force things. You only need to force things if they are seriously broken.

When replacing packages in place, I much prefer to use rpm's --force. It will install over even if the same package is installed, without leaving it uninstalled.

jonathonp · #5 7th July 2008, 12:04 PM

Hi jman. can u provide an example for the --force option (forced re-installation of a package). johnny

Zigzagcom · #6 8th July 2008, 11:12 PM

Probably like this, as in my case I had a broken "netstat":

Code:

rpm -ivh --force net-tools

You would however need to download the package first, as rpm has no knowledge of repos.

leigh123linux · #7 8th July 2008, 11:28 PM

If you are using F9 you can use yum !

Code:

yum reinstall  required_package

i.e

Code:

yum reinstall  firefox

leigh123linux · #8 8th July 2008, 11:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jman

Some explanation is needed.

--justdb will only update the installed lists in the rpmdb, and not remove any files.

--nodeps will not process dependencies. I normally consider --nodeps to be evil as it can seriously break things by forcing their removal.

yum will never do the equivalent of either of these operations because yum doesn't force things. You only need to force things if they are seriously broken.

When replacing packages in place, I much prefer to use rpm's --force. It will install over even if the same package is installed, without leaving it uninstalled.

I prefer

Code:

rpm -Uvh --replacefiles --replacepkgs packagename

jonathonp · #9 9th July 2008, 07:43 AM

Thanks for your help leigh and zigzagcom. Nothing worse than uninstalling a package when you really want to reinstall a package since the package for removal may actually be a dependency for other packages which when removed can break the system or reduce it significantly thus requiring a huge re-installation.

The re-installation option is one thing i liked about PC Linux and Ubuntu. If a package was broken it wasn't a big deal to reinstall. I'm glad i can stick with fedora for ease of use. i will put these commands in my tips and tricks notes.

aplexpress · #10 22nd May 2009, 03:56 PM

I am using F10.

Apart from downloading, what difference between
rpm -ivh --force package
and
yum reinstall package?

RahulSundaram · #11 22nd May 2009, 05:57 PM

Hi,

rpm --force <foo> will ignore all the required dependencies for the package foo while yum reinstall foo would not do that.

aplexpress · #12 22nd May 2009, 07:27 PM

thank you.

angeltux · #13 22nd May 2009, 08:50 PM

thanks a lot buddy

Linux Archive