Fedora Live Update plus Uninstalling Gnome

[mikeydeeeee]

Hello all, two part question:

After reading a few articles about how easy it is to upgrade versions of Fedora using yum (no smiley) I decided to upgrade my FC6 system to FC7 using that strategy, which basically breaks down to:

1. Clean up the repository & yum environments
2. Load the new release packages using rpm
3. Do a 'yum update'
4. Do a few houskeeping tasks and reboot

Easy right? Well not really, since the third operation generally craps out six or eight hours into the process due to the huge number of dependencies it tries to reconcile during the Transaction Test step.

Now since the machine I'm working on is basically a hobby box (and I have a lot of time on my hands) I decided to try to get through the live update process instead of doing a clean install from the system disks like any sane person who read the FAQs would do.

Anyway, I figured that since the number of dependencies should increase exponentially with the number of packages currently included in the system, removing some packages might reduce the number of resolutions they force to the point where the process would succeed. Doing this does seem to improve the situation, since the update now makes it to the second download stage, but it then dies there for the same reason. Obviously, more packages must go. Up to this point, I was just taking out individual packages I either never used or replaced with other software, but at this point I figured more serious measures were warranted.

This brings us to the second part of the question:

I decided that since I'm a happy KDE user, I'd uninstall GNOME and XFCE using 'yum groupremove'. XFCE uninstalled like a dream, but doing a groupremove on GNOME basically initiates the removal of almost every package on the system, including KDE. Not exactly what I was hoping for. I imagine it occurs because of applications which declare dependencies on both packages when installed on a system which houses both KDE and GNOME.

So again, a two part question:

Has anyone else out there tried the 'yum update' methodology to upgrade between Fedora versions, had the same problem I did and figured a way around it?

Has anybody else out there had the same problem with 'yum groupremove' and figured out how to limit it to the more restricted intended consequence?

Thanks in advance,
MikeD

[LordMorgul]

First, yes groupremove will remove more than you intended in that situation. There is no way around that problem other than doing 'yum groupremove getridofthis; yum groupinstall groupstokeep'. In the first you'll lose lots of packages you want to keep, then put them back.. hopefully not getting so broken in the middle that it fails to reinstall things.

There is no alternate definition of a 'group' right now. Removing a group will remove every package that is listed as part of the group AND any packages that are specifically dependent on packages in the group. Ultimately that means lots of overlap when removing some groups (the desktop environment groups are the worst for this). [edit] your only good option for this is to manually select packages that are part of the group you want to remove, using yumex, synaptic, or pirut, and gradually cut down the amount of packages you have installed.

I've updated across releases many times using the basic yum upgrade process. It can definitely help to pick a smaller set of packages for the first try and then continue after that. One way I'd recommend doing that is:
yum update rpm yum python mkinitrd
yum update glibc libc* kernel
yum update