Smart Only Allows one Kernel to be Installed by Default

[Anders F Björklund]

> Hi,
>     I have been encountering an issue for sometime with Smart 1.4.1 whereby it will allow, by default, 1 kernel at a time to be installed on the grounds that multiple kernel versions cannot co-exist with each other. I don't understand why this is the case in Fedora (this occurs in all versions from Fedora 18 to Fedora 20) when the same version under Mandriva allowed multiple kernel versions by default.

afaik, the Fedora used to set "multi-version" on all kernel packages.

>     I can get smart to allow multiple kernels by issuing the multi-version flag parameter, but why is this necessary when it is not required to allow multiple versions of the kmod.nvidia proprietary packages?

I believe the kernel version is encoded in the *name* of the package ?

So it's not really multiple versions of one, it's multiple packages...

>     Having told smart to allow multiple versions of the kernel to be installed how do I specify how many versions I want maintained, like can be done with the native Fedora package manager?

You cannot... And as far as Smart is concerned, RPM is the native p.m. :-)

Supposedly one could add some kind of new hook, to let the system fiddle
with the changeset before fetching and installing/uninstalling the packages:

http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb?p=yum.git;a=blob;f=yum/__init__.py;hb=HEAD#l6353

Or just have a separate script do the cleanup. Less convenient, less yucky ?
It all depends on how important it is to stay bug-compatible with yum, I suppose.

--anders