zypper ve showing package error that will not repair

English Applications
#1

Opensuse upgraded me to plasma 5.9. I ran zypper up and I got this message:

The following package update will NOT be installed:
  kernel-default

The following 3 applications are going to be REMOVED:
  Desktop "Grouping Plasmoid" "System Tray"

Then I ran zypper ve and I get:

The following 21 applications are going to be REMOVED:
  "Activity Bar" "Analog Clock" "Application Menu" "Battery and Brightness" Calendar Clipboard "CPU Load Monitor" Desktop
  "Device Notifier" "Digital Clock" "Grouping Plasmoid" "Hard Disk I/O Monitor" "Hard Disk Space Usage" Icon Lock/Logout
  "Media Player" "Memory Status" "Network Monitor" Notifications "Panel Spacer" "System Tray"

The following package is going to be reinstalled:
  plasma5-workspace

1 package to reinstall.
Overall download size: 5.5 MiB. Already cached: 0 B. No additional space will be used or freed after the operation.
Some of the dependencies of installed packages are broken. In order to fix these dependencies, the following actions need to be taken:

I’m not understanding what I’m being told, and it didn’t look good to me, but I hit “y”. Not much happened, a couple files downloaded and installed. But when I rebooted, I got the same message, so I did it again with the same results. I was wondering if anyone could tell me what’s happened. Thank you much!

Mike

#2

I’m having the same experience.


# rpm --verify plasma5-workspace
# echo $?
0
#
#3

Ignore that.
It’s a flaw in the Appstream metadata.
Problems like this are ongoing since ever zypper gained support for “applications” years ago.

Note that the message says that the applications are removed, not any packages.

In this particular case it seems to be a “bug” in the plasma5-workspace package which will hopefully be fixed soon.
http://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1024326

#4

in addition: “The following package update will NOT be installed” this is caused by only using zypper up. if your on tumbleweed sudo zypper dup --no-allow-vendor-change (that is, if you actually want it installing)

#5

No, I’m pretty sure this is not caused by using “zypper up”. :wink:

Again, it’s a “bug” in the repo metadata. It misses the information that the plasma5-workspace package contains the mentioned “applications”, so zypper thinks they will be removed when the package is updated.
As this appdata is generated automatically, it’s not straightforward to fix either.