Known issues/limitations

Wikis > Package Manager > Known issues/limitations

The following issues with Arca Noae Package Manager (ANPM) are known to exist at this time:

  • In certain instances, upon installing the bootstrap package (usually, during the initial ANPM setup), it will be necessary to add some packages to enable existing installed applications to continue to function. A known example of this is the libicu-legacy package which is required for Apache OpenOffice (see related information on path validation, below). Watch for a dedicated wiki page for this.
  • Filtering the available package list by repository may fail to display the latest version of a package if a newer version is available from another repository. Example:

Searching for ‘poppler-qt’ (not installed), perhaps version 0.999.0-1.oc00 is available on my-other-great-repo. Even though there are (older) versions available on netlabs-rel, these are not shown in the list of available packages.

If the filter drop-downs are used to show only packages from netlabs-rel, poppler-qt will no longer appear at all. This is because these filters are simply subsets of the already-queried data (and not new queries).

In this case, the only way to view versions of poppler-qt from netlabs-rel is to perform a search, which sends a new query to yum with the show-obsoletes flag set.

This is expected behavior.

  • When updating one or more packages, some installed RPMs do not have current versions listed in Download Packages confirmation dialog. This is normal for packages which are actually being replaced by newer versions as opposed to simply being updated. The differences between these two operations are beyond the scope of this document (the end result is the same: the newer files are installed and the older files are removed). This is expected behavior.
  • The i386 architecture has been deprecated in favor of i686. As a result, packages which have been updated for the i686 and pentium4 architectures may not reflect the current version numbers in the available package list, although the icon may indicate that they have been updated recently. Selecting the listed package will always install the latest available for the configured architecture, however. As a workaround, start ANPM with the /DUP switch. This will cause all available versions (duplicate package names, but all versions and architectures) to be displayed in the available package list. We are working on improving the package filtering logic to address this.
  • When viewing the RPM package content for packages where multiple architectures are available, all available architectures are listed (but not labeled) in the package content window. For example, selecting the option to display package contents for the diffutils package will present a listing in triplicate (i386, i686, and pentium4). We are working on improving the filtering logic to address this.
  • Some YUM plugins may cause unpredictable results, as they might when running yum from the command line. These are either limitations of the plugins themselves or how they interact with other applications (namely, Python) on the OS/2 platform.
  • Changing architectures (i386 to i686, i386 to pentium4, pentium4 to i686, etc.) from the RPM Platform Configuration dialog or by editing %UNIXROOT%\etc\rpm\platform directly may lead to unpredictable results. This is a YUM issue, and not a defect of ANPM. We are considering ways to help make these changes easier.
  • It is not possible to quickly scroll through lists of files by selecting the first letter of the package name. This is a standard system limitation for these types of windows; the scroll will stop on the first occurrence in any column of the letter pressed, not just the name.
  • Once an operation has started, there is no option to abort. This is intentional, as the idea is to never leave the system in an inconsistent state. Simply allow the operation to complete and then reverse the procedure to undo (e.g., install package A, then uninstall it).
  • Selecting more than one version of the same package for installation always results in the latest version being installed. If it is necessary to install an older version of a package, use the menu choice to install a specific version. This is expected behavior.
  • It is possible that in some circumstances, enabling the path validation check may cause other applications to stop working correctly. If this is the case for your system, simply disable the path validation check in the Preferences dialog and restore CONFIG.SYS from backup.
  • Inaccessible repositories are administratively disabled, after a generous retry period of 1-2 minutes. Exit ANPM, ensure that connectivity has been established, perhaps by pinging the repository’s server, and restart ANPM to retry. This is expected behavior.
  • Damaged repository metadata may appear to hang ANPM for an extended period of time with the progress bar reporting:
    Updating repository data...

    Exit ANPM and restart ANPM to retry. If this does not result in an expected update time, exit ANPM and wait some time before retrying. Generally, the repository or mirror maintainer will address the issue without requiring third-party notification of the problem. In extreme cases, notify the repository or mirror maintainer of the problem.

  • While it is possible to share the yum cache between multiple boot partitions, be careful to set the UNIXROOT environment variable appropriately for each partition. ANPM will attempt to warn before downloading and (re)installing a yum/rpm configuration, but it is not possible to foresee every possible scenario.
  • Currently, only RPM packages may be managed by ANPM. A future release will add support for managing WarpIN archives and repositories. WarpIN repository handling added in ANPM 1.1.0.
  • After installing or updating one or more RPM packages, an information panel is displayed reporting:
    Error: Rpmdb checksum is invalid: dCDPT(pkg checksums): <package name>

    This is a known YUM defect. ANPM is not generating this error, only passing it through from YUM. See the Netlabs RPM project ticket 117 for more information. (Generally, this error is only cosmetic, and it has been known to appear on multiple platforms, not just OS/2.)

  • If multiple versions of the same package are listed as installed, from the Manage menu, try running YUM tools > Maintenance > Complete transaction. Usually, this is just the result of the prior version of an update package not being removed from the RPM database.
  • The 9.2.x gcc package obsoletes libgcc1 with libgcc. ANPM does not prompt to reboot after, resulting in Python failing when attempting to refresh the package list after install. To resolve this condition, reboot and start ANPM again. This lack of reboot prompting will be addressed in a future release of ANPM. Alternatively, edit pkgproc.lst in the ANPM program directory and add libgcc to the line prefixed with R:. This has been addressed with an update to pkgproc.lst in the 1.0.6 release, and ANPM now checks for updates to this file when available from Arca Noae.
  • When attempting to update python 2.7 (before 2.7.18) to python 3, an information panel is displayed reporting:
    yum-metadata-parser-1.1.4-7.oc00.pentium4 requires python27.dll

    The easiest way to work around this issue is to install both the python2.7 and python3 packages from the command line:

    [c:\] yum install python3 python2.7

    Alternatively, select both of these packages from the Available packages list in ANPM (do not attempt to upgrade python from the Installed packages list). At the conclusion of the procedure, ANPM will report a yum error, and the package lists in ANPM will be blank. Close ANPM, and follow the directions to reboot the system. ANPM will function normally following the reboot. Installing from the command line avoids these extra steps.

  • After a Python3 upgrade, yum-complete-transaction may fail to start with:
    ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'yum'

    (yum-utils-1.1.31-3 installed).

    This is due to the yum-complete-transactions script attempting to load Python3 (python) instead of Python2.7 (python2.7). To work around this issue, edit the first line of the yum-complete-transaction script to read:

    #!/usr/bin/python2.7 -tt

    Save the file and attempt the operation again. This issue should be resolved with an updated yum-utils package. (This issue does not occur when running Manage | YUM tools > Maintenance > Complete transaction from the ANPM menu, as all YUM operations are called using Python2.7. Editing the script as suggested above to allow it to function from the command line will have no adverse effect on ANPM’s use of it, either.)

  • Python, RPM, YUM (or other applications, including the bzip2 executable) may fail silently with a return code of 14 when PHP is running manually, as CGI, or as module under Apache. This is due to a DLL name conflict with the bz2.dll PHP module, which is binary incompatible with the system bz2.dll needed by RPM. The POPUPLOG.OS2 entry for this is something similar to:
    01-24-2024 16:22:44 SYS2070 PID 4182 TID 0001 Slot 0165
C:\USR\BIN\PYTHON.EXE
RPMIO7->BZ2._BZ2_bzflush
127

    where the executable name be anything dependent upon the system bz2.dll. (Conversely, if the system bz2.dll is loaded in memory, and PHP is started later, PHP may fail to start in similar fashion, simply returning to the command prompt.)

    This may be mitigated in one of several ways, two of them being:

    1. If the Apache and or PHP session is started first, set BEGINLIBPATH to include the PHP modules directory; or
    2. If the bz2 PHP module is not needed, simply comment it in PHP.INI

  • ANPM may exit silently or the system may hang completely when running the DLL conflict check for hplip 3.19.12-1 packages (hplip, hplip-common, hplip-libs, and libsane-hpaio). The issue appears to be in the code when returning to ANPM following the DLL conflict check.

    To avoid this problem, deselect the above packages from the list of packages to be updated, allow the other packages to update, exit ANPM, and update hplip from the command line via yum:

    [c:\] yum update hplip

    This should allow this set of packages to update without error. This issue is under investigation.

This entry last updated: by Lewis Rosenthal