Encountered a classic ‘Catch 22’ problem with a recent Pidora 20 update..

The version of RPM – rpm-4.11.2-3.fc20.v6.armv6hl – was broken, as it had the ‘build architecture’ set to arm5tel, instead of armv6hl..

This meant that all subsequent yum updates failed, with ”package xxxxxxxxx.armv6hl is intended for a different architecture” errors.

And… updating RPM with yum also failed, or course, with the same error..

With the ‘bad’ version of RPM:

# rpm --showrc | head
ARCHITECTURE AND OS:
build arch : armv5tel
compatible build archs: armv6l armv5tejl armv5tel armv4tl armv4l armv3l noarch
build os : Linux
compatible build os's : Linux
install arch : armv6l
install os : Linux
compatible archs : armv6l armv5tejl armv5tel armv4tl armv4l armv3l noarch
compatible os's : Linux

The – rather messy – solution was to manually download all the associated Pidora rpms for the later version of RPM, and then use the
# rpm -Uvh rpm*rpm – -ignorearch command to ‘locally’ update RPM to a later, correct version..

The Pidora RPM update rpms can be found here:   http://pidora.ca/pidora/updates/20/armv6hl/r/ (scroll down…)

Result:

# rpm --showrc | head 
ARCHITECTURE AND OS:
build arch : armv6hl
compatible build archs: armv6hl noarch
build os : Linux
compatible build os's : Linux
install arch : armv6hl
install os : Linux
compatible archs : armv6hl noarch
compatible os's : Linux

– and all subsequent yum updates worked OK, again..!

Robert Gadsdon..    May 24, 2014