Can't upgrade some perl modules

[Richard Siddall]

Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> When I try a yum update (using rpmforge), I get these errors, so I can't 
> really update my systems:
> 
> file /usr/share/man/man3/bigint.3pm.gz conflicts between attempted 
> installs of perl-5.8.0-97.EL3 and perl-bignum-0.22-1.el3.rf
[snip]
> 
> Is there a way to update w/o having to upgrade MS?

You're running into one of the classic RPM packaging problems with Perl. 
  The main Perl RPM contains the bignum Perl module.  You're trying to 
install just an updated version of bignum, but RPM can't replace part of 
the main Perl RPM; it's the whole RPM or nothing.

The usual way of getting around this is to force installation of the new 
package.  yum will have left a copy of the RPM in the cache for the 
repository you downloaded it from, so you can probably do something like:

	rpm -Uvh --nodeps \
/var/cache/yum/rpmforge/perl-bignum-0.22-1.el3.rf

where rpmforge is the repo name.

As has been pointed out on the list before, there's a small possibility 
that forcing installation of a new module will stop existing Perl 
programs from working.

The alternative is to add perl-bignum to the list of RPMs that are 
excluded from updating for the repo that's causing the conflict.  Find 
the repo file in /etc/yum.repos.d/ and append perl-bignum to the exclude 
line, or add an exclude line if there isn't one there already.

	exclude=perl-bignum

I hope that helps.

Regards,

	Richard Siddall