Forcing Installs with Up2date

If you have trouble with dependencies running up2date, the Red Hat update system, you can force download and installs by downloading the packages regardless of dependencies and then forcing the install. Be careful when you do this, or course. The system is there to make sure you install the correct packages, so if up2date tells you you need a dependency, you may very well need it. We ran into an interesting problem with a gcc upgrade.

We solved it by downloading the package and then forcing the install with the nodeps option:

[root@srv-6 up2date]# up2date --get gcc --tmpdir=/root/
Fetching all package list for channel: rhel-i386-es-3...
########################################
Fetching all package list for channel: rhel-i386-es-3-extras...
########################################
Fetching package list for channel: rhel-i386-es-3...
########################################
Fetching package list for channel: rhel-i386-es-3-extras...
########################################
gcc-3.2.3-53.i386.rpm...
########################################
[root@srv-6 up2date]#

Now let's force the install with nodeps:

[root@srv-6 root]# rpm -Fvh gcc*.rpm --nodeps
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:gcc ########################################### [100%]
[root@srv-6 root]#