Bug #64169 RPM "Obsoletes:" lines make it impossible to "yum install" specific old versions
Submitted: 30 Jan 2012 18:44 Modified: 14 Feb 2013 11:31
Reporter: Davi Arnaut (OCA) Email Updates:
Status: Won't fix Impact on me:
None 
Category:MySQL Server: Packaging Severity:S3 (Non-critical)
Version:5.5 OS:Linux
Assigned to: CPU Architecture:Any
Tags: CentOS, obsoletes, regression, rpm, yum

[30 Jan 2012 18:44] Davi Arnaut
Description:
Yum refuses to install a specific version of any package if some other package "obsoletes" it by name. For example, this makes it impossible to install MySQL-server-community-5.0.45 as long as there are MySQL-server-5.5 packages in any yum repository due to MySQL-server-5.5 having an "Obsoletes: MySQL-server-community".

How to repeat:
Yum install a MySQL-server-community package while a MySQL-server-5.5 package exists in one of the yum repositories:

yum -d 0 -e 0 -y install MySQL-server-community-5.0.45-0.rhel5

Package MySQL-server-community is obsoleted by MySQL-server, trying to install MySQL-server-5.5.19-1.rhel5.x86_64 instead

Suggested fix:
Revert fix for fix bug#11886309: RPM UPGRADE OF MYSQL ADVANCED GPL TO MYSQL SERVER ADVANCED DOES NOT WORK

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mysql/mysql-server/5.5/revision/2661.790.1
[31 Jan 2012 20:07] Sveta Smirnova
Thank you for the report.

Verified as described.

But there is still issue for this bug for me: according to http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora_Draft_Documentation/0.1/html/RPM_Guide/ch-depen... "obsoletes" is proper way for cases when name of packages are changed.

Workaround: use RPM
[14 Feb 2013 11:31] Sveta Smirnova
Internal copy was closed as "Won't fix":

[20 Mar 2012 9:52] Daniel Fischer (DAFISCHE)

We can't really do anything about it, "obsoletes" is the proper mechanism for
what we intend to do, namely, inform RPM that MySQL 5.5 packages
supercede/replace the various different 5.0/5.1 products, even those that
have different names. If yum doesn't allow installation of older packages
just because newer ones are available, that's a shortcoming of yum.