Often when I run YaST2 Online Update, on the first try I get a message telling me that I should apply YaST updates before continuing. Is there a way to selectively update YaST components before others during the automatic update process, or will I have to just hope that I don’t end up with a broken update system?
There ought to be a way to do this, since the update process depends on YaST being in a consistent state.
Whenever I have run YaST Online Update manually it has,after displaying that message proceeded to only select the zypper, rpm etc. packages. After “Accept” it then updates only those packages and it is necessary to run YOU again to complete the process.
If you have installed and set up “yast2-online-update-configuration” to perform automatic updates, this will all happen without you being aware of it. But you should still check manually occasionally to perform updates that require intervention – e.g. a reboot.
As far as I have experienced this, when there are patches for zypper (and zypplib), they are offered when I do a YaST > Software > Online update, with other patches in the list, but unchecked and not checkable. After excepting those patches for installation, they will be installed and YaST online Update will then be started automagicaly again for the other patches. I do not see any reason for worrying or other, you are taken by the hand and this works already for ages.
About “automatic” updtates I can not say much, because I will never do such a thing.
You are doing it wrong.
I used to run into that problem, when I was new to openSUSE.
What’s happening, is that you are seeing a list of updates. But most of them are not selected for installing. And then you went ahead and selected them. That’s when you get the message about applying Yast updates first.
When you see that happening, don’t select the other updates. Just go ahead. It will install the Yast and libzypp updates, and then it will restart. And, on the restart, the other updates will usually show up as selected this time around.
Okay, there is one exception that I occasionally see. Sometimes there are updates that are marked as optional, and are not selected. That happens infrequently. I do usually select those, though it doesn’t matter because they are optional (and don’t do anything important).