On Tue, Oct 04, 2016 at 20:42:11 -0700,
Adam Williamson <adamwill(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
I'd say broadly speaking both, but the most disruptive and potentially
catastrophic effect is when the update process itself crashes or is
killed. Because of how RPM transactions work, this generally leaves you
with RPM convinced you have two copies of a bunch of packages
installed, and cleaning that up is kind of tedious. The more processes
are running underneath the dnf process, the more likely the dnf process
is to get knocked out by something else. (I don't know if dnf could
sensibly be changed to mitigate this issue; it's really not my focus. I
just want to try and help real users deal with the software as it
currently exists.)
package-cleanup --cleandupes still works on f25, though I am not sure what the
proper dnf version of this is. (I needed this about a week ago when an
issue triggered by a kernel problem I don't fully understand caused an
update to be terminated.) You can usually get the updates to finish and then
clean up the duplicates. Sometimes it gets trickier.
The one thing I absolutely would advise against: don't do an
update
over ssh! Unless you use screen or tmux, of course. But just sshing in
and running an update is a great way to potentially hit trouble.
This isn't as bad as you might think. While I mean to use screen, I often
forget and very rarely have problems as restarting sshd doesn't shut down
existing ssh sessions.