[LON-CAPA-admin] yum update

[Stuart Raeburn]

Hi,

The runtime used by maxima varies between the different Linux  
distributions (Fedora, Red Hat, SuSE). The strategy taken with  
LON-CAPA has generally been to include the dependency on maxima alone  
in LONCAPA-prerequisites, and pass off the responsibility for the  
maxima runtime dependency (and any lisp dependency) to the maxima rpm  
shipped for a particular distribution.

In some cases (e.g., Red Hat 4 AS/ES) a maxima package is not included  
in the standard rpms available for the distribution so one was built,  
and added to the appropriate repository on the install.loncapa.org site.

When I last checked the maxima runtimes used by the differesnt distros  
were as follows:

Red Hat 4: maxima-exec-gcl
Red Hat 5/Centos 5/Scientific Linux 5:  maxima-runtime-sbcl
Fedora 5/6/7 maxima-runtime-gcl
SuSE10.X/SLES9/SLES10: maxima-exec-clisp

Apparently with its latest update to maxima 5.15, Fedora 8 switched  
from using maxima-runtime-gcl to maxima-runtime-sbcl.  Unfortunately  
the packagers didn't implement a strategy to prevent the old  
maxima-runtime-gcl dependency from causing a "failed dependency error"  
when performing a yum update.

On Fedora 8 I did:

rpm -e --nodeps maxima-runtime-gcl maxima
yum install maxima

to solve this.

If you want to prevent maxima changes being picked up by yum on  
Fedora/RHEL5/Centos5/ScientificLinux5 in the future you can add the  
following to /etc/yum.conf

exclude=maxima*

If maxima has been updated and you want to test that LON-CAPA is still  
able to operate successfully with it via the lonmaxima daemon, a new  
problem can be created in Construction Space using either the  
mathresponse or formularesponse templates (with CAS).

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group


Quoting "H.K. Ng" <hkng at fsu.edu>:

> Hi, I guess one question is whether the cas problems work since one of
> the maxima packages name has changed, from maxima-runtime-gcl to
> maxima-runtime-sbcl. I haven't got any maxima problems to test it on.
> -hk
>
> At 10:12 PM 7/11/2008, you wrote:
>> H.K. Ng wrote:
>>> yum update on fc 8 seems to complain about a missing dependency
>>>
>>> Error: Missing Dependency: maxima = 5.14.0 is needed by package
>>> maxima-runtime-gcl
>>>
>>> However,
>>>
>>> rpm -qa | grep maxima
>>> maxima-runtime-gcl-5.14.0-4.fc8
>>> maxima-5.14.0-4.fc8
>>>
>>> shows that both are installed. On the development machine I removed
>>> both packages and LONCAPA-prerequisites and did a yum update and
>>> then
>>> reinstalled LONCAPA-prerequisites but then it did not install the
>>> same maxima packages. Instead
>>>
>>> maxima-runtime-sbcl-5.15.0-1.fc8
>>> maxima-5.15.0-1.fc8
>>>
>>> were installed. Has anyone else run into this problem?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> -hk
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> A few days ago, I updated our Fedora 8 servers with yum. I
>> was offered
>> maxima 5.15.0 packages which I could install without any problems.
>>
>> Do you still have problems with missing dependencies or are you asking
>> if it was ok to let the system install the 5.15.0 packages?
>>
>> Stefan Bisitz
>>
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