Can't upgrade some perl modules

[Gerry Doris]

Richard Siddall wrote:
> 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
I ran into much the same problem a week ago.  I was getting a yum error 
when it tried to update my main perl rpm.  There were several conflicts 
with rpm's installed by MailScanner.  I ended up shutting down 
MailScanner and removing the problem rpm's.  I then did the yum perl 
upgrade.

I did a MailScanner reinstall to confirm everything was ok (I was told 
MailScanner was already installed).  All has been working fine.