On Sun, 26 Jul 2015 09:09:00 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
This may or may not have anything to do with your problem but it's one I ran into with dnf...
I was trying to update a package I KNEW was in updates-testing (I pushed it myself) but when I asked dnf to update it it gave me the "Nothing to do" message.
After that I tried all the dnf clean metadata|all tricks and it still wouldn't find the updated package. Then I tried dnf --enablerepo=updates-testing list <package> and lo and behold it was there!
Then I released that because it was a library, and another package was dependent on it, that it was refusing to update the package!
While that's certainly the correct behavior, the lack of any sort of USEFUL message to the user is extremely confusing and frustrating.
It's a known thing and a major design flaw in that tool. It tries to be helpful by hiding some things under the carpet, but that is counter-productive as it causes too much confusion. I think I've seen a few related messages on devel@ list recently, too. The evelopers are aware of it.
With Yum it has been a bit similar with --skip-broken and suggesting that option when running into unresolvable dependencies. Many users follow such suggestions without even trying to understand the broken dependencies, and things can get worse because --skip-broken is not a safe solution.