Centos 4.4 and 4.5 apt problems...

Ok, so the first question would be "Why the f*** do you use apt for CentOS?!?!". Well the answer is simple - yum is too intelligent and is too big of a blabber, so its not useful for automation. Thats why apt is preferred - its dumb as a door knob, it works fast and it does not try to do things fully automatically (like up2date).

up2date is also an alternative that could be used but wen you one day discover that the uber expensive and uber busy system has crashed and its the fault of up2date upgrading the system automatically, well... no thanks...

There is a file conflict between the centos-release and apt - one of them has got too smart. In 4.3 the centos-release provided just basic necessities, but now also includes both yum and apt repository lists. And as apt has not been upgraded for a while, there is a file conflict at hand.

The bug has been reported and assigned in the centos bug tracker, but it looks like the fix wont come out anytime soon.

So here is my quick fix - rebuild the apt rpm. In the apt spec file line 122 is:

%{__install} -p -m0644 centos.list %{buildroot}%{_sysconfdir}/apt/sources.list.d/

remove or comment out this line and run:

rpmbuild -ba apt.spec

To make the build succeed I also had to do this "hack" on line 140:

%doc %{_mandir}/man?/* -> %doc %{_mandir}/man*

This will produce a new rpm that can be manually upgraded with rpm and the upgrade to centos 4.5 can continue. This will also give an opportunity that when the conflict is finally resolved the new apt will get upgraded or the old one can be reinstalled depends on who gives up the file...

Also a recommendation for the apt maintainer would be to include a buildreq. for "bzip2-devel" and "libselinux-devel"

Update:

As I was asked for my version of the apt.spec I uploaded it here.

technorati tags:centos, 4.4, 4.5, apt, rpm, file, conflict, solution

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