PSA: Rawhide - what to do if switch to dnf5 fails because dnf is protected

[Adam Williamson]

I've heard a couple of folks report that they tried updating a Rawhide
system or container and it failed with:

Problem: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: dnf

The problem seems to be caused by doing the upgrade with an older dnf
installed. dnf-4.15.1-1.fc39 was tagged into Rawhide on May 18th, and
it dropped the protection of dnf (and yum). So there was a month or so
where the 'current' dnf package you got on Rawhide update dropped the
protection of dnf itself, and if you updated to that version before the
dnf5-by-default update arrived this week, your upgrade to dnf5 should
go fine.

However, if you *didn't* update your system to dnf-4.15.1-1.fc39,
you'll encounter this problem when you try to update now, because the
older dnf build you have installed still considers itself protected.

You have a couple of options if you're stuck in this situation: either
update to 4.15.1 first (by grabbing the packages from
https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=2202454 and
updating them), or rename or edit the file
/etc/dnf/protected.d/dnf.conf so dnf is no longer protected. After
doing that, the upgrade should work correctly.

It's also been reported that using the pre-switchover dnf5 to do the
switchover upgrade (the one that makes dnf5 the default and removes
dnf) may not work. If it doesn't, then just use dnf to run that upgrade
instead.

Sorry for any trouble caused by this!
-- 
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @adamw(a)fosstodon.org
https://www.happyassassin.net