"yum update" failure and resulting cleanup headaches.

[David Timms]

Naoki wrote:
> This question seems to come up a lot.  And the fedora-list usually has
> somebody asking how to recover from it.  When 'yum' fails for whatever
> reason there will be some part of the 'cleanup' phase left undone. At
> which point the manual repair of the RPM DB needs to take place, a long
> and tedious task. At best even if you have the procedure as a (almost)
> single command line, it can be annoying.
> 
> Any official plans to have yum gracefully recover from a failed update?
I think that there are a few different issues that appear to be the one 
issue:
a. there was a time when running a rpm/yum/pup udpate within an X 
session would cause an issue when reloading a config file, causing the X 
session to restart. This meant that the update did not complete since 
the package removals did not occur. It seemed the best way to clean the 
double-up entries is to run dupes-cli.py.

b. there is a different issue where there might be a problem with the 
rpmdb. If this occurs, an rpm -q kernel would work, but an rpm -qa|grep 
kernel hangs, forever. If this is the case, the other rpm based tools 
(yum/pup/pirut) also hang if an attempt is made to run them. In this 
case it is necessary to do the ~ rm /var/lib/__db.00* to fix rpm.

If you have both problems, you need to take care of b. first.

There has been some requests for yum to be more [bad eg mains reboot 
during update!] fault tolerant. I forget whether these where on the yum, 
yum-devel or comments on seths blog that has the dupes-cli.py

David Timms.