Zypper clean-up

So I was having this problem updating some Kerberos 5 patches in my SuSE test environment -- apparently a patch RPM was broken. I tried fixing that by downloading them directly, not using

sudo /usr/bin/zypper up

but

sudo /bin/rpm -Uvh krb5.patch.rpm

instead. No dice.

Since there was no yum clean equivalent in the Zypper version (0.6.201) in my server, I promptly deleted all sources under /var/lib/zypp/cache, thinking I could just refresh the cache later on. Well, it didn't quite work that way.

Zypper complained about missing sources, so I had to look for the source files that refer to the cached source directories:

sudo grep -l Source.garbage /var/lib/zypp/db/sources/*

and removed them as well. I did another run of sudo /usr/bin/zypper up and I was able to install the patches successfully.

There must be a better way of doing this...