8.5.2. Exclusive Dependency Resolving

Exclusive dependency resolving is what YUM does when you execute a yum install. Unless you've specified one of the packages satisfying any of the dependencies in the transaction, YUM is going to look up the best match for you. This results in the installation of only one package providing the requirement(s) of other packages, rather then all packages providing said requirement being installed.

As an example, imagine you install a package foo which requires capability web-client. Using exclusive dependency resolving, YUM would select one package providing the web-client capability whereas inclusive dependency resolving would include all packages providing the web-client capability.

During the installation procedure, one of the major features of installation media, anaconda is going to use YUM dependency resolving to satisfy all the dependencies.

Installation Procedure !== Upgrade Procedure

Note that an installation procedure is not the same as an upgrade procedure. With an installation procedure for example, you have control over the partitioning layout whereas with an upgrade procedure, you have none. More importantly, during an upgrade procedure, the (already installed) system has an existing package set which needs to be updated/upgraded and thus could possibly introduce dependency resolving problems, because of third party packages installed on the system, or because the media used to upgrade the system with does not contain the software packages needed to complete the upgrade RPM transaction.