# Playbook not idempotent because operation is not, any way to workaround?

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-not-idempotent-because-operation-is-not-any-way-to-workaround/14947>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [April 5, 2014, 6:50pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-not-idempotent-because-operation-is-not-any-way-to-workaround/14947 "2014-04-05T18:50:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Sean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f0a364/32.png) [@Sean](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Sean)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2014, 6:50pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-not-idempotent-because-operation-is-not-any-way-to-workaround/14947/1 "2014-04-05T18:50:12Z")

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I am experimenting a playbook and one task failed during its execution

----- my playbook -----

- name: yum install epel packages

yum: name=[http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86\_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm](http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm) state=present

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**Author:** ![Dick\_Davies](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Dick\_Davies](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Dick_Davies)\
**Post date:** [April 6, 2014, 5:41pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-not-idempotent-because-operation-is-not-any-way-to-workaround/14947/2 "2014-04-06T17:41:18Z")

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In this case it sounds like yum has had an issue and got itself in a  
mess, it's not really  
something Ansible can do much about as it delegates to yum to handle this.

If it requires user intervention to solve, that's where ad-hoc  
commands come in.

ansible all -a "sudo yum get\_your\_act\_together"

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**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\
**Post date:** [April 9, 2014, 1:35pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/playbook-not-idempotent-because-operation-is-not-any-way-to-workaround/14947/3 "2014-04-09T13:35:05Z")

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Yep, this isn’t really an idempotence question, this is how to deal with an error question.

See details here:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=database+disk+image+is+malformed](https://www.google.com/search?q=database+disk+image+is+malformed)

The suggestion seems to be to rebuild your package database.

This is not something we’d want the yum module to do automatically.