After upgrading to fedora 14 at work I did some builds against various kernels, u-boot, buildroot and toolchains we use.  I ran into an interesting problem.

make[2]: Entering directory
`/home/mjhammel/src/cei/sysbuild/bld/buildroot-2010.05.xcc/output/toolchain/linux-2.6.32.14′
/home/mjhammel/src/cei/sysbuild/bld/buildroot-2010.05.xcc/output/toolchain/linux-2.6.32.14/arch/powerpc/Makefile:178: *** mixed implicit and normal rules.  Stop.

?A bit of googling shows that make 3.82 changed in a way that makes kernel compiles break if the kernel source has not been patched.  You can patch the kernel (or other code) or you can punt like I did and backtrack to make 3.81 since there is no switch to 3.82 to disable this function.  I had to ask on the Boulder LUG mailing list to find out how to downgrade, since I'd not done previously.  In Fedora, the way to do this is as follows:

yum –releasever=13 downgrade make

After that you'll need to add:

exclude=make

to the [updates] section of /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo.  However, when I did the downgrade like this I got an error message:

The gpg keys listed for the “Fedora 13 – x86_64 – Updates” repository are already installed but they are not correct for this package.  Check that the correct key URLs are configured for this repository.

The gpg keys are part of the fedora-release packages, which are tied to the release version, so it would be a bit tricky to import them.  The way around this is to tell the yum operation to ignore the GPG check, like so:

yum –nogpgcheck –releasever=13 downgrade make

More information on importing GPG keys can be found at the fedora project.

update: 2010-11-29

I noticed today when I tried to do a yum update that the make package was not excluded.  A little googling showed that a better place to place the exclude=make line is in the /etc/yum.conf file, as the last line in the [main] section.  I did this (and removed it from the /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo file) and the update proceeded without updating the make page.