Trying to remove yum which is protected in Centos

Question

Well, I'm trying to execute the following command.

yum remove libffi-3.0.9-1.el5.rf.i386

Because I need that file (?), however facing problems while installing ruby with rvm, as libffi-devel is a dependecy of rvm to install ruby.

However it gives me the following error, and of course it doesn't delete anything.

Error: Trying to remove "yum", which is protected
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

I've already tried with --skip-broken and I get this:

Error: Trying to remove "yum", which is protected
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

As you may see, I'm not an expert in Linux, but I need to install Ruby with rvm and I can't because of this error, does anyone of you have an idea of what am i doing wrong?

Thank you :)

Answer 1

The right way to do what I was looking for is by doing:

rpm -e --nodeps PACKAGE

in the command line.

Answer 2

The command yum remove <package> removes the package as well as any packages that depend on it.

In your case, you are trying to remove a package that has many other packages depending on it, including the yum package itself. It is as if you run yum remove yum , which is why you get this error message.

The command:

rpm -e --nodeps <package>

Can be used to remove a package without removing the packages which depend on it but this will obviously break all these other packages.

Installing or removing packages with rpm --nodeps can cause applications to misbehave and/or crash, and can cause serious package management problems or, possibly, system failure.

For more details see https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/sec-Removing.html