Opened 14 years ago
Closed 14 years ago
#5884 closed defect (wontfix)
Cannot upgrade existing Fedora Linux VB install to 3.1 using 'rpm --upgrade' or 'yum update'
| Reported by: | Dave Ulrick | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | installer | Version: | VirtualBox 3.1.2 |
| Keywords: | RedHat RPM | Cc: | |
| Guest type: | other | Host type: | Linux |
Description
Prior to VB 3.1, the Fedora RPM's name was structured in such a way that "rpm -q VirtualBox" would return something like this:
VirtualBox-3.1.2_56127_fedora11-1.i586
but with the new VB 3.1 RPM, the full name is as follows:
VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora11-1.i586
and the short name includes the version number '3.1':
# rpm -q VirtualBox-3.1 VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora11-1.i586
The 'rpm' command provides an '--upgrade' option that allows the user to uninstall an older version and install a newer version in its place. With prior VirtualBox RPMs this feature worked, but the new naming convention makes it impossible to use '--upgrade'. Instead, this command sequence is necessary:
# rpm --erase VirtualBox
# rpm --install VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.2_56127_fedora11-1.i586.rpm
As a side effect, this naming change also breaks 'yum update VirtualBox' when the Sun VirtualBox Fedora repository is configured in /etc/yum.repos.d/.
This is not a bug but a feature. The reason is that some users might prefer to stay at VirtualBox version 3.0.x for some reason. We tried several times to build a smoother upgrade path but to my knowledge this isn't possible with rpm. See here for the discussion.