On Sun, 05 Aug 2018 10:50:09 +0100 Russel Winder russel@winder.org.uk wrote:
Hi,
I had an enforced "not able to upgrade Fedora Rawhide for too long" period. On doing the updates, one of my four computers updated fine, the other three however got into problems. They are now in a state where "dnf check-updates" reports a number of obsoletes, but "dnf upgrade" says nothing to do, and "dnf check" reports 2000+ duplicates. I am certain someone in the past told me how to get out of this as I am fairly sure I had a not dissimilar situation early last year. However, I cannot find the email that I am sure I kept somewhere.
In desperation I tried "dnf remove --duplicates" and after downloading 2.3GB it reports large numbers of dependency fails and does nothing.
I am confident there must be a way of solving this short of re-installation, hopefully someone knows the magic I need to fix these three computers.
I think you want to see what the issues are. Do dnf --best update 2> dnf_errors.txt and look at the output file. It is kind of like a log jam. There are probably a few key packages that are orphaned, and they depend on older libraries that are common to many other packages. Once they are removed, the logjam will resolve itself. Using this technique allows you to manually determine whether the updates are more important than a package you have installed that is blocking the update.
If you use dnf --best --allowerasing update it will remove anything that blocks updates, but that can be a lot of packages, some of which you might want to keep. You can use the dnf logs in /var/log to re-install packages that have been removed that you want to still have installed. Sometimes this fails because a version that works with the updated libraries is not available, though.