[Mageia-discuss] troubles with update ended with totally dead system.

[Claire Robinson]

On 21/09/11 02:52, Juan R. de Silva wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> I do not know if it could be seen as a kind of a contribution...
>
> I installed Mageia 1 almost as soon as it was released for evaluation
> purposes on Dell Latitude d820. Mine is a multiboot environment with
> several distros like Ubuntu Lucid, Fedora 15, Arch, SL 6.1, and a couple
> of others installed.
>
> I kept playing with it from time to time (my main systems for now are
> Ubuntu Lucid on laptop, and Debian Squeeze on my workstation). I should
> say I was quite impressed, especially considering short time Mageia
> exists.
>
> Then troubles started. On one of next system updates I had these:
>
> Sorry, the following packages cannot be selected:
>
> - kdebase4-runtime-4.6.5-1.1.mga1.i586 (due to conflicts with soprano-
> plugin-virtuoso-2.6.0-0.1.mga1.i586)
> - kipi-plugins-expoblending-1.9.0-3.1.mga1.i586
> - task-kde4-4.6.5-0.mga1.noarch
> - task-kde4-minimal-4.6.5-0.mga1.noarch (due to conflicts with soprano-
> plugin-virtuoso-2.6.0-0.1.mga1.i586)
>
> google provided with one link only. It was Mageia forum, not exactly my
> case but had enough to be considered helpful.
>
> 'rpm -e --nodeps  soprano-plugin-virtuoso' revealled the plugin was not
> installed at all. A little weird, update conflicting with a not installed
> packages, "never mind" I said.
>
> After run 'urpmi soprano-plugin-virtuoso' and installing the plugin I
> happily get get rid of almost all the above warnings. But still had this
> one:
>
> Sorry, the following package cannot be selected:
>
> - kipi-plugins-expoblending-1.9.0-3.1.mga1.i586
>
> Well, that was quite a progress.
>
> I run 'urpmi kipi-plugins-expoblending' and on the next update attempt I
> did not get any restricting warnings/errors. So far so good. Finally I
> could proceed with the update.
>
> It seemed to complete well: no warnings, no errors. Except one little
> dirty thing - the system failed to boot after restart. It stuck at GRUB
> prompt with no errors displayed, just a word "GRUB". No reaction on any
> key, not 'e', not 'c', not 'shift' button, not any others. Not even Ctl-
> Alt-Del. The only way to get out of there was pressing Power Off button.
>
> Booting from SystemRescueCD and reinstalling grub helped nothing. Plain
> dead system.
>
> But this was a climax. I get to the Mageia forum, trying to search for a
> clue and get this:
>
> "Sorry but you cannot use search at this time. Please try again in a few
> minutes."
>
> And no, folks, I've not reported any bugs. Sorry, far to many... :-( At
> the end I did not try to anything funny here. Just a regular system
> update.
>
>

This is a known bug, it *should* be solved now.

There is a bug report at https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2097

It was quite a bad bug as it did break the update but it brought to 
light the now infamous bug 2317 - 
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2317 - which all updates have to 
be checked against.

We have begun linking any required packages into updates media to 
prevent any recurrence of that unfortunate incident. If any do slip 
through the net then the affect you will see is that MageiaUpdate will 
give an error saying a certain package cannot be selected. Please do 
report this if you experience it!

This only affects MageiaUpdate, so you can still perform the update from 
the command line as root (urpmi --auto-update) or by installing the 
updated packages in rpmdrake instead.

Hopefully we are on top of this now though and a permanent solution is 
being worked on behind the scenes.

Sorry if you had a bad experience with this.