recover from broken yum transaction

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Sep 11, 2008, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-09-11 at 03:24 +0200, Ahmed Kamal wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I had my computer hang during a major yum upgrade.

> When this happens you should run:
> yum-complete-transaction

Neat!

In a slightly different scenario: I often find that, if the ssh
connection from which I start 'yum update' is broken for whatever
reason (say the machine from which I started reboots or so), yum gets
an error posting its progress reports, and then it starts removing
lots and lots of packages to keep dependencies from being unmet.

Wouldn't it be much nicer if, like, it ran to completion without
regarding the stdout errors; recorded a recovery transaction to revert
the removals, or at least recorded a transaction to complete the
interrupted update?

I realize the latter is risky, for you may end up unable to start yum
in the first place, but this unfortunately is also the case of the
current code.  Last time I got this error, an elfutils update was part
of the transaction, and it stopped at such an unfortunate time that
elfutils got removed, and rpm would no longer run.  Oops :-)

Is this bug report material?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}