Preupgrade still sucks. Maybe sucks less, maybe sucks more.

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Mon, 2011-06-06 at 09:05 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote: 
> On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com> wrote:
> > You'll get a lot of bitch about packages already installed but anything
> > missing will get installed or you will get an error.  Currently, it
> > looks like avidmux from rpmfusion isn't reinstalling for me.  Oh well.
> > It eventually will.

> Just an FYI, the avidemux package was broken by the move from js 1.70
> to 1.8.5 in Fedora 15. I'm working around it by re-enabling the
> bundled js while I try to fix it.

> There is already a new build available but hasn't made it into ...-testing yet.

That's very interesting.  Very interesting indeed and explains a lot.
Yeah, js was at the heart of the other packages I had to uninstall and
manually reinstall like elinks as well.  And, sigh, this appears to also
be at the core of what blew preupgrade / anaconda out of the water on
the machine where it did run and that I'm working to recover now.

I found that on MtKing in emergency mode I could manually start up the
network using ifup (service network (re)start was an epic fail thanks to
the god's be damned systemctl command) and bring that up to a
functioning level other than the dain bramaged bug in the networking
code that's shutting down IPv6 router advertisements on bridges but
that's a known problem and outside the scope of this mess.  IAC, I got
the box talking on the network and communicating with my package cache
server once I had v6 back up.

Ran yum update just to see if anything was missed or messed up in the
install.  That told the tale.  Of the close to 4,000 packages (that's
according to what get cached for fc15 on my cacher) that should have
been installed or updated, it was still missing almost 60 packages, had
almost a dozen and a half rpm database check errors (mostly missing
requires) and it still had avidmux-* dependency errors that could not be
resolved.  That made sense.  The two machines were equivalent in the
installed databases.  Why didn't anaconda stop and bitch about THAT if
it couldn't resolve it?

It appears that Anaconda got past whatever made it blow up with the
"unhandled exception" in the case of the Forest machine and it continued
on even with an unreconcilable dependency error.  It then failed
catastrophically near the end of the install phase but before any of the
postinstall scripts where run (which is why initramfs was never created
even though the kernel rpm was installed).

So, I cleaned up avidmux-*, elinks, and one other package by doing a yum
erase on js.  Then I was able to install the remaining missing packages
(which had already all been downloaded, they just hadn't gotten
installed) and then reinstall the other packages I had removed other
than avidmux.  That update also cleaned up the "preexisting errors" mess
in the rpm database.  Everything is now installed but, still, none of
the original 4000 some odd postinstall scripts were run.  Still dumps me
into emergency mode and "systemctl default" still complains about
"Transaction would be destructive".  So that still leaves me with a
steaming pile I'm trying to clean up.  Progress forward but not quite
there yet.  Not sure what the best path is to follow at this point.
Downgrade to F14 and back up to F15?  Try rerunning preupgrade again (I
don't think so)?

The good news is that, with the network back up this far, I can also
move the two LXC based virtual machines (one of which is my master DNS
server) off of that host and over to the alternate host, Forest, and I
only have one machine flat on its rear out of this mess.  That's doable.

To the preupgrade devs - I would strongly recommend you test with a
known broken machine that has dependency problems that anaconda can NOT
resolve and make sure it gracefully stops and generates sane,
intelligible error messages...  The current avidmux is a good place to
start.

> Thanks,
> Richard

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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