[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Providing specific version numbers of packages to install with yum...

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

> 
> I'll give this a shot, but it seems that we still will have a timing issue 
> here. I've gone through this a couple of times, and I'm convinced that the 
> issue I'm running into is that the EPEL Erlang repo is not being fully 
> installed before yum goes to install the correct version of the Erlang 
> package. Most recently when I tried this (hard-coding a specific Erlang 
> version as part of the recipe), I got this error:
> 
> FATAL: Chef::Exceptions::Package: yum_package[erlang] (erlang::default line 
> 35) had an error: Version R14B-03.3.el5 of erlang not found. Did you 
> specify both version and release? (version-release, e.g. 1.84-10.fc6)
> 
> However, I know that if I run chef-client again on this node, everything 
> will install fine. I'm wondering what is the proper way to ensure that the 
> EPEL Erlang repo is fully installed before trying to do the yum install of 
> the package -- put the yum install in a ruby_block, to force it to be as 
> late in the process as possible? Is there a way to cause the install of the 
> EPEL Erlang repo to happen a lot earlier in the process?
Yes, use the run_action trick. Using apt-get update as an example that I'm 
familiar with:

    execute "apt-get update" do
      action :nothing
      # !!! If you put the run_action inside the block, put it last
      run_action :run
    end

This will probably fix your problem. Chef has some internal caching of yum 
info that could be involved as well, but it's had a lot of updates recently 
so I'm not sure of the best procedure to flush it anymore.

HTH,

-- 
Dan DeLeo