What's wrong with yum in F19?

[Cristian Sava]

Hi all,

I have a virtual install of F19 x64 and I want to update:

yum update

...

Transaction Summary
=================================================================================================
Upgrade  188 Packages

Total size: 143 M
Is this ok [y/d/N]: y
Downloading packages:
Running transaction check
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded
Running transaction
/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/history.py:761: UnicodeWarning:
Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments to Unicode -
interpreting them as being unequal
  if checksum == sql_checksum:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/bin/yum", line 29, in <module>
    yummain.user_main(sys.argv[1:], exit_code=True)
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 355, in user_main
    errcode = main(args)
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/yummain.py", line 261, in main
    return_code = base.doTransaction()
  File "/usr/share/yum-cli/cli.py", line 769, in doTransaction
    resultobject = self.runTransaction(cb=cb)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/__init__.py", line 1782, in
runTransaction
    self.skipped_packages, rpmdb_problems, cmdline)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/history.py", line 941, in
beg
    pid   = self.pkg2pid(txmbr.po)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/history.py", line 798, in
pkg2pid
    return self._ipkg2pid(po, create)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/history.py", line 792, in
_ipkg2pid
    return self._pkgtup2pid(po.pkgtup, csum, create)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/history.py", line 775, in
_pkgtup2pid
    checksum))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/sqlutils.py", line 168, in
executeSQLQmark
    return cursor.execute(query, params)
sqlite3.ProgrammingError: You must not use 8-bit bytestrings unless you
use a text_factory that can interpret 8-bit bytestrings (like
text_factory = str). It is highly recommended that you instead just
switch your application to Unicode strings.

I tried to fix this but "yum clean all", "rpmdb --initdb", "rpmdb
--rebuilddb" does not help.
Trying to update individual packages work for some, fail for others.
I can't update rpm, yum, python and others.

Any advice how to fix this?

Thanks,
C. Sava