Transaction Check Error During EMR Bootstrapping

[pingometer]

If you attempt to run activities/common-crawl on Amazon EMR, it will terminate with an error:

On the master instance (i-xxxxxx), bootstrap action 1 returned a non-zero return code

This is related to Amazon's changes in the package environment and its dependencies.

Log:

Transaction check error:
  file /etc/init.d from install of chkconfig-1.3.49.3-2.14.amzn1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package EmrMetrics-1.0-1.noarch
  file /etc/init.d from install of chkconfig-1.3.49.3-2.14.amzn1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package service-nanny-1.0-1.noarch
  file /etc/init.d from install of chkconfig-1.3.49.3-2.14.amzn1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package instance-controller-1.0-1.noarch
  file /etc/init.d from install of chkconfig-1.3.49.3-2.14.amzn1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package hadoop-state-pusher-1.0-1.noarch

Here are two workarounds - both in mrjob.conf:

1. Change the EMR AMI version to 3.5.0 or later.
2. Change the YUM installation line to use this format:

yum --releasever=2014.09 install <package_name>