How to downgrade and remove rpms in the same command?

Question

I have a problem where in order to satisfy RPM dependencies, I need to remove packages and downgrade them in the same command.

Imagine the following situation

Before

• A v2.0 depends on B,C
• B v2.0 depends on C > 1.0
• C v1.1

After

• A v1.0 depends on C
• C v 1.0

If I issue a

$ rpm -Uvh --oldpackage Av1.0.rpm Cv1.0.rpm

it will fail with "B depends on C > 1.0"

If I issue a

$ rpm -e B

it will fail with "A requires B" so I appear to be in a catch-22. The obvious solution is to use a "--nodeps" and remove B before doing the downgrade, but I am creating these commands programmatically so I was hoping to use dependency resolution as a sanity check against an incorrect script.

Is there any way to perform this downgrade without breaking the RPM dependency sanity checks by force?

Answer 1

yum shell allows you to specify multiple operations before executing them all within a single transaction.

Answer 2

You can use the --nodeps options to -U before the removal of B if you like. (or --force is a combination of a few good flags ;-)