Possible rpm badness upgrading from F8Test2

Edit: take this post with a grain of salt – we’re currently unable to reproduce the problem, and we’ve done multiple tests on i386 and x86_64 machines. It may have already been fixed. Still, it’s a weird and interesting problem so I’m leaving this here for future reference.

We’re tracking down a problem where a fresh F8Test2 install can, after upgrading to current rawhide, end up with no rpm-libs – and thus no way to install packages. Yikes. Luckily it’s fairly tricky to hit this bug – we haven’t been able to reproduce it on i386, for instance.

As far as we can tell the required sequence of events is as follows:

1. Install F8Test2 – on a 64-bit machine – with a custom package selection that includes the Development group
   This will install rpm-devel-4.4.2.2-0.1.rc1, which (accidentally) includes all the libs that rpm-libs normally provides. The installer will not install rpm-libs, since all the files in that package are already provided by rpm-devel.
2. Boot your fresh new F8T2 system and notice ~150 new updates.
3. Install the new updates.
   During this upgrade, yum will upgrade rpm (and friends) to 4.4.2.2-0.4.rc1. This new rpm-devel package does not include the rpm libraries anymore, so yum should notice this and pull in the rpm-libs package, to keep rpm working. For some reason, on multilib (i.e. 64-bit) machines, it does not.

After this update, your system would be missing rpm-libs and thus unable to install any packages. So you can’t install the rpm-libs package to fix the problem.

Hopefully we’ll have this isolated and fixed before F8Test2 goes live. It’s pretty easy to work around, if you know about it – just install rpm-libs as soon as you boot your F8Test2 system for the first time – but if your system gets messed up it’s tricky to recover.