Installing RPM packages with circular dependency

Question

I'm trying to follow an article to enable smart card login on my RHEL 6.6 desktop. When I attempt to install coolkey-1.1.0, it says ccid and pcsc-lite is needed.

• When attempt to install ccid-1.3.9.7, it says pcsc-lite is needed.
• When I attempt to install pcsc-lite-1.5.2, it says pcsc-ifd-handler is required.
• When I search Google to see what rpm I need to get pcsc-ifd-handler, it looks like pcsc-ifd-handler is included in the ccid or pcsc-lite-openct package.

I already tried to install ccid and it needed pcsc-lite, so then I tried to install pcsc-lite-openct-0.6.19 and it also says it needs pcsc-lite.

So I'm kind of stuck in a cycle where the package that has pcsc-ifd-handler is dependent on pcsc-lite being installed, but pcsc-lite can't install until the package that contains pcsc-ifd-handler is installed.

Solution 1

Circular dependencies are usually resolved by picking one of the RPM's in question and just doing a --nodeps --force on the install then proceeding onto the other one.

I've read elsewhere that you can just give both files to rpm at the same time and that will work around it. Never done that myself, though.

Solution 2

Give all the RPMs in a single line:

rpm -ivh [RPM 1] [RPM 2] [RPM 3] ..... 

In your case it would be:

rpm -ivh coolkey-1.1.0 ccid-1.3.9.7 pcsc-lite-1.5.2

Comments

[roartechs]

Thanks that worked. I installed the pcsc-lite package with --force --nodeps and now I am able to install the other rpms.

[Ashwin]

Just verified that for circular dependencies you can give both to the rpm command at the same time and have it installed

[doktor5000]

You could have simply installed those packages via yum, and it would have automatically resolved those dependencies between the packages. (that is, if ccid provides pcsc-ifd-handler). yum would also provide the benefit of pulling additional dependencies from the repositories, if there would be any.

[Bratchley]

yum could be a possibility, but I was trying to answer the question as directly as I could. It's possible they have particular RPM's that they're wanting to install, for instance. Plus yum implies they have access to the repo's in question. If this is a rhel machine without an active entitlement manually installing the RPM's is pretty much the only feasible alternative. I didn't want to get into all that. If I had it to write over again I'd do what Ashwin suggested since that seems safer and even more direct. I just didn't know rpm worked like that.