F8 -> F9 horror

[Sam Varshavchik]

scm in seattle writes:

> Hi Rex,
> 
> yum repolist shows: Fedora - Rawhide...
> 
> My own doing surely while looking for some other package I required. I 
> guess it's time to rebuild the installation, unless you have any other 
> suggestions on how to recover this mess. Thanks for your help. 

Well, it should be possible to recover, but it is not going to be easy.

/var/log/yum.log should have a nice hairball that lists all the packages 
that got upgraded. You'll need to take that list, grab the most recent 
versions of these packages from F8 updates, or F8 base, then shove them in 
with rpm -U --oldpackage.

This will work only if two conditions are met:

1) The KDE packages have not been refactored: that is a package being 
replaced or merged by another package of the same name. If so, you'll need 
to backtrack and identify the previous name of the corresponding package, 
and apply the necessary rpm voodoo to force-uninstall the new package, and 
install the old one as part of the upgrade.

2) That KDE 4 did not obliterate your old KDE 3 configuration settings, and 
when you go back KDE won't go bonkers because of unrecognized configuration 
settings. If so, you'll need to trawl through your home directory and nuke 
all the hidden dot-directories that store KDE configuration. That should 
reset KDE to its default configuration settings, and you'll need to manually 
apply restore what you had configured before.

I'm sure that this is possible and a reinstall is not necessary, but it 
won't be easy. Consider it a learning experience. Recovering from a botched 
upgrade is a valuable skill, that you will eventually have to put to use.

On one of my laptops, an upgrade from F8 to F9 crapped about at about a 90% 
mark with some obnoxious Anaconda traceback. The option to save the 
traceback for diagnostics was utterly useless. It harassed me for a network 
host+port, and login/password info, without divulging even a shred of a clue 
as to what exactly it wanted: an HTTP server address, with authorization 
information, ssh login parameters, ftp login parameters, or whatever. After 
giving up an attempt to save some diagnostics for a subsequent Bugzilla 
entry, I rebooted and restarted the F9 installer.

Restarting the upgrade in F9's installer didn't do anything. It did not want 
to upgrade anything.

Rebooting into F9 revealed an utterly barfed system. X couldn't start, and 
complained about some missing module. A royal mess. Eventually, I concluded 
that about 100 packages, out of 1000+ were completely uninstalled. Gone. No 
trace of them in the rpm database, and the files were uninstalled. Swell. 
Fortunately I had a custom daily cron job that saved the list of installed 
packages, from that I slapped together a script to identify the list of 
missing packages, then assemble the list of files on the F9 DVD that I 
needed to install. That fixed it.

So, this is an excellent opportunity for you to learn how to recover a 
bolloxed upgrade job, yourself. Good luck.

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