Wednesday, July 07, 2004

RPM's and Circular Dependencies

A little tidbit I picked up today... has to do with that familiar yet undesirable place in the psyche called "rpm hell" in the Linux world.

Ever tried installing a software package with RPM, only to find that it has a dependency on package #2? So you try installing package #2, and it fails because it depends on package #1? So neither package installs, because they keep running in a big dependency circle!

What to do, what to do?!

You can install BOTH applications at the same time by including them both in one RPM command. Like:

rpm -ivh package1.rpm package2.rpm

Well, how about that! Neither one should complain now, and the flames of your rpm hell have been doused and extinguished (at least for the moment).

3 comments:

Unknown said...

That was some good information. Wish I had known about it before though. :D

Chris Gralike said...

Beautifull example is installing the gd-devel for Nagios for example.

gd-Devel depends on.
freetype-devel
fontconfig-devel
libX11-devel
libXpm-devel
libjpeg-devel
libpng-devel

All is well till you cross the libX11-devel.

it depends on.
libXau-devel
libXdmcp-devel
xorg-x11-proto-devel.

when you got it all figured out, there is some dependency in the xorg-x11 devel that depends on the mesa-libGl that depends on the devel-X11.

So #1 needs #2,#3,#4 then #4 needs #3 and #5, and #5 needs #1 :S

If anyone crosses this one, the final command will look something like...

rpm -ivh ./libX11-devel-1.0.3-9.el5.i386.rpm ./xorg-x11-proto-devel-7.1-9.fc6.i386.rpm ./libXdmcp-devel-1.0.1-2.1.i386.rpm ./mesa-libGL-devel-6.5.1-7.5.el5.i386.rpm

Ow well, welcome in hell indeed ^^

Great post btw :)

Fab said...

lol, 9 years later, this saved me at 1.30am ... Cheers really !
(did not have yum)