When dnf fails.

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Let us assume the dnf update inbetween. You lost the remote connection to the computer where the update was running or systemd oom killed the dnf task.

Concerning systemd-oomd, you turn it off via:

systemctl disable --now systemd-oomd

Now you are stuck in dnf limbo. How to get out of it with less effort as possible?

Try 0

If you can do this without an error then you are on a good way:

dnf -y remove --duplicates

Try 1

Well, if try 0 resulted in conflicts, we can try to solve them semi-autotamic:

dnf -y remove --duplicates 2> error.log
cat error.log | awk -F 'from install of|conflicts with file from package' '{print $2}' | sort -u | awk 'NF' | sed s/"^ "/"dnf -y reinstall "/g | sh
dnf -y remove --duplicates 2> error.log

Try 2

We end up here if errors after try 1 still remained:

cat error.log | awk -F 'from install of|conflicts with file from package' '{print $2}' | sort -u | awk 'NF' 

Now we need to deal with the remaining problem manually. This package is still broken:

darktable-4.4.2-1.fc37.x86_64

This does not work:

[root ~]# dnf -y reinstall darktable-4.4.2-1.fc37.x86_64
Last metadata expiration check: 0:03:59 ago on Sat 09 Mar 2024 04:17:07 AM CET.
Package darktable available, but not installed.
No match for argument: darktable-4.4.2-1.fc37.x86_64
Error: No packages marked for reinstall.

Okay, maybe we need to delete the old package manually:

cat error.log | awk -F 'conflicts with file from package' '{print $2}' | sort -u | awk 'NF'

The problem lies with:

 darktable-tools-noise-4.0.1-2.fc37.x86_64

We will remove it carefully(!!!). Don’t use -y and check the list if something important is on the to-be-deleted list:

dnf remove --noautoremove darktable-tools-noise-4.0.1-2.fc37.x86_64

Now we should be able to do this:

dnf -y remove --duplicates

Finalize

Now we can finalize the repair with:

dnf -y update --best --allowerasing --skip-broken

dnf -y --enablerepo=* update --best --allowerasing --skip-broken

Depending on if you want to include other non-default repos from your repo-list.

Protected packages

If you get complaints about protected system packages, you can disable this protection by:

mv /etc/dnf/protected.d /etc/dnf/protected.d_xxx

However, you should restore the protection later:

mv /etc/dnf/protected.d_xxx /etc/dnf/protected.d

The source code is Open Source and can be found on GitHub.