Problems installing Online Updates

This document (7004374) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11

Situation

A Problem Temporary Fix (PTF) for a bug report has been installed on the system. Later, when an online update for that package appears, the update tools silently ignore the update, so the online update is never installed. Using "zypper lu", the available update is not even seen.

Resolution

Use YaST Online Update to install the update. It will present a popup where the choice "install with vendor change" is available. With this option, the update can be installed

Additional Information

Because of a problem in the configuration in the build system used for producing PTFs, the vendor string on PTFs was set to "openSUSE Build Service" on all PTFs built before August 13, 2009.

The update tools are configured to not consider packages from a different vendor (as determined by the vendor string) as updates - this is why the update tools won't show or use these packages. With the command

zypper lu

it is normally possible to display a list of available updates. However, packages with different vendor strings are not shown. To get a list of all available packages with higher version numbers than those installed on the system, it is necessary to use the -a flag

zypper lu -a

While these packages are not seen as updates, it is possible to force an update using the installation feature of zypper. In the example shown in the screenshot above, the update would have been installed using the command

zypper in xorg-x11-xauth

or using the patch installation feature

zypper patch

With the patch installation feature, a question similar to that from YaST will be presented on the command line and it is necessary to select the option that allows installation with vendor change. With the "zypper in" method, this question will not be presented, which makes this method suitable for use in scripted updates, when such problematic updates need to be installed on multiple machines.

Disclaimer

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