Updating rawhide installation makes it basically unbootable

[Michal Jaegermann]

I was away from my rawhide test system for roughly two and a half
months and today I tried to bring it up to date.  In this particular
case this meant that I updated today, so far, 1355 packages.  That is
where troubles started.

An attempt to boot 3.5.0-0.rc6.git2.1.fc18.x86_64 kernel, with
initramfs produces by dracut-020-84.git20120711.fc18.x86_64 (yes, I
have seen warnings about dracut-020-51) does not boot at all.  After a
long delay I am getting on a screen:

dracut-initqueue[131]: Warning: Could not boot.
dracut-initqueue[131]: Warning: /dev/disk/by-label/x2f1 does not exist

Entering emergency mode.  Exit the shell to continue.
Type "journalctl" to view system logs.

Typing "journalctl" repeats mostly the same as above.  Not very
illuminating.  As far as I can tell "does not exist" is right as this
initramfs does not detect ANY of disks which happen to be on my system
so missing partitions are not a surprise.  systemd serves as an init
so it is not clear to me how to even start debugging this nastiness.

Booting old 3.4.0-0.rc4.git2.1.fc18.x86_64, which used to work just
fine, also gets me into troubles.  Partway through a boot process at
41.250027 mark (this frog was supposed to be at least quick, right?)
systemd goes into a long funk and eventually comes back with

[  107.823548] systemd[1]: Job dbus.socket/start failed with result
'dependency'
......
followed by more of "failed with result 'dependency'" and additional
bunch of "Dependency failed for ..." for mostly anything you may want.
That eventually ends up with:

Welcome to emergency mode. Use "systemctl default" or ^D to enter
default mode.
Press enter for maitenance(or type Control-D to continue):

"Maitenance" shows that from all my file systems on / and /usr are
mounted at this point.  Typing 'mount -a' gets also "the rest" and
one can start network and exit this "maitenance" shell to get to a
graphic login screen.  Any attempt to log there will be rejected,
though, most likely because none of the stuff which is supposed to run
at this point is running.  One can get at least through a remote login.

Any ideas what is really going on and how to start to cleanup that
mess?

To add an additional annoyance this update decided to switch, by itself,
my timezone to US/Eastern.  What a bright idea was that?

   Michal