yum-complete-transaction wants to remove 159 packages

[Mike Williams]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 1:05 PM, stan <gryt2 at q.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:37:50 -0400
> Mike Williams <dmikewilliams at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi there.  On a system that recently had a fresh install of f13 I got
>> the following message from yum:
>> "There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider
>> running yum-complete-transaction first to finish them."
>>
>> When I ran yum-complete-transactions another message appeared:
>> "There are 1 outstanding transactions to complete. Finishing the most
>> recent one The remaining transaction had 228 elements left to run"
>>
>> Then after a very long list of packages it wants to remove including:
>> bash, yum-utils, and xorg-x11-drv-nouveau it says:
>>
>> Remove      159 Package(s)
>>
>> This sure seems like it will kill the system.
>
> Just as a check to see if the packages have been replaced by newer
> packages, and the update crashed before the erase step completed, you
> could run some queries for critical packages to see if the version
> installed is newer than the erase version.
>
I saw Craig's message first, then ran package-cleanup --dupes and sure
enough there were duplicates of all of those packages and it was the
older one that yum-complete-transaction wanted to erase.  I ran
yum-complete-transaction again and let it delete them this time.
>
> What happens if you do a yum update and ignore the warning?  Does it
> still warn the next time you run an update?

Yes, it still happened after a yum update was done.  I was waiting to
see if an update would make the problem go away, but it persisted.

> Unless there was a problem with a previous update, it seems like it is
> an error that it should be indicating that transactions need to
> complete. Perhaps you should file a bugzilla
> (http://bugzilla.redhat.com) against yum that it is flagging the
> situation incorrectly.  I vaguely recall that there can be overlap
> between anaconda and yum in functionality, so this might be an error in
> anaconda, leaving the system in a state that yum interprets as an
> incomplete transaction.

I will file a BZ later today.  Unfortunately I do note remember if the
problem happened with the first update after the initial install, so
whether it was yum or anaconda is not clear.

Thanks to all of you for the help,

Mike