Upgrading MySQL 5.1 to 5.5 on Centos 6 without removing dependencies I'm trying to upgrade MySQL 5.1 to 5.5 using yum/rpm combo (yum to remove MySQL 5.1 and rpm to install MySQL 5.5). Most instructions I've found suggest to do first:

yum remove mysql mysql-server mysql-libs


However doing so will remove in my case lots of other packages which I definitely don't want to remove:

================================================================================
 Package              Arch        Version                   Repository     Size
================================================================================
Removing:
 mysql                x86_64      5.1.69-1.el6_4            @updates      2.4 M
 mysql-libs           x86_64      5.1.69-1.el6_4            @updates      4.0 M
 mysql-server         x86_64      5.1.69-1.el6_4            @updates       25 M
Removing for dependencies:
 cronie               x86_64      1.4.4-7.el6               @cr           166 k
 cronie-anacron       x86_64      1.4.4-7.el6               @cr            43 k
 crontabs             noarch      1.10-33.el6               @cr           2.4 k
 mysql-devel          x86_64      5.1.69-1.el6_4            @updates      388 k
 percona-toolkit      noarch      2.2.4-1                   @percona      5.7 M
 perl-DBD-MySQL       x86_64      4.013-3.el6               @base         338 k
 php-mysql            x86_64      5.3.3-23.el6_4            @updates      216 k
 postfix              x86_64      2:2.6.6-2.2.el6_1         @base         9.7 M
 sysstat              x86_64      9.0.4-20.el6              @base         807 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================


How can I upgrade MySQL without removing those packages? Can I somehow remove MySQL 5.1 without dependencies (well, maybe besides mysql-devel) and get away with it? (without libraries mismatch). I've found one blog that suggest to upgrade MySQL in yum shell, however I'm not sure if it would change anything? :
You can remove MySQL without removing the dependencies with RPM:

rpm -e --nodeps mysql


Keep in mind that yum is going to complain next time you try to install a package about the rpm database being modified. You can correct that with yum clean all.