I think quite a lot of users know the situation when you are unable to boot or run a system due to broken upgrade or problems created from the keyboard site. Recently I experience combination of both, but what then? First idea was to take out hard disk and connect it into working system, but then better idea appeared. The Fedora is delivered on boot-able live CD and I remembered that somewhere I have one. But will it work, and can I repair Fedora 25 from Fedora 23 live CD? Lets see what happened. After booting from CD I checked if I can see the hard disk with broken system. I open from Activities application called Files and in “Other Locations” I opened the disk with Fedora 25. Data were there and I was happy that at least something is working. Now I moved my attention to terminal. I know that if I want to do repair I have to upgrade DNF of running system into DNF-2.0 from dnf-nightly repository on copr and I did ('dnf copr enable rpmsoftwaremanagement/dnf-nightly' then 'dnf upgrade dnf'). The reason to do that was that dnf-2.0 provides many patches for installroot and additionally it provides commands like check or option --duplicates for remove command that are pretty handy for repair of the system. The next question was how to find path to my broken system in terminal. I have seen that I have some directories with unique names (say crazy names) in root dir and I searched for them by 'sudo find / -name <name_dir> ' or if you don’t have such, it is possible to create it in tmp/ dir on disk that you search for by Files, because for that directory you don't need any special permission. From this research I got the path for --installroot option. Consequently I was able to begin with repair. First I tried repolist command if I can see repositories of my original system and if releasever is correctly detected. Another good news, the command 'dnf –installroot=/<path/to/disk> repolist' worked like expected. I know that accidentally I removed one package required by selinux and I successfully installed it by 'dnf --installroot=/<path/to/disk> install selinux-policy-targeted'. Then I started with removing of duplicates discovered by command 'dnf --installroot=/<path/to/disk> check'. The first attempt was with command 'dnf --installroot=/<path/to/disk> remove --duplicates' but it didn’t work because I had some duplicates with unsatisfied dependencies, therefore it tried to remove too many packages. Therefore I continued with remove of each of duplicates by 'dnf --installroot=/<path/to/disk> remove '. But this time I was very careful to not remove something that I don’t want, because for first time I tried to remove duplicate of selinux-policy and I remove the only copy that had installed all dependencies and kept the version that don’t have selinux-policy-targeted. Last problems that remain on my system were duplicates of dnf and python3-dnf, but I was unable to remove them with information: Error: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: dnf. Well here helped rpm ('rpm -e '). Then I did upgrade of the system and everything looked good. It was the point when I tried if the system was repaired – reboot. And the system was again alive. The last question was if all packages were installed correctly from primary cause of the story - broken upgrade. I decided to do the last step, reinstall of all packages by “dnf reinstall ‘*’ ”. This is the end of the story, my system works again due to Live CD technology and DNF-2.0. Long live to Fedora and DNF. Jaroslav Mracek
I have seen several discussions about proper behavior of installroot and often it happened that what was requested by one user several others declined. But all of them had one thing common, that they would like to have proper description of installroot behavior. Now I can proudly announce that installroot entered new era where the behavior is slightly changed, but documented in detail. Basically what was changed
dnf --installroot=<installroot> --releasever=<release> install system-releasereleasever of the system within <installroot> directory from given <release>.dnf --installroot=<installroot> --setopt=reposdir=<path> --config /path/dnf.conf upgrade--setopt using configuration from /path/dnf.confDNF-2.0 is available for testing! The next major version release of DNF brings many user experience improvements such as more understandable dependency problem reporting messages, weak dependencies shown in transaction summary, more intuitive help usage invoking and others. Repoquery plugin has been moved into DNF itself. Whole DNF stack release fixes over 60 bugs. DNF-2.0 release is focused on getting rid of yum incompatibilities i.e. treat yum configuration options the same (`include`, `includepkgs` and `exclude`). Unfortunately this release is not fully compatible with DNF-1. See the list of DNF-1 and DNF-2 incompatible changes and prepare for the upcoming official release. Especially plugins will need to be changed to the new DNF argument parser. For complete list of changes see DNF and plugins release notes.
Another stability release of DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE has been made. This release should eliminate the most critical bugs, especially the Unicode tracebacks and COPR plugin should work in Korora again. More information about the release can be found in DNF and plugins release notes.
DNF is in EPEL for more than one year, unfortunately there was still the old DNF-0.6.4 version. Over that time in DNF were implemented a lot of great features and plenty of bugs have been fixed. DNF (especially its libraries) could not be updated in EPEL repository because of its policy. Now we have prepared fresh DNF-1.1.9 for RHEL 7 and CentOS 7 users in our COPR repository. Note this is still experimental preview not supported by Red Hat. In order to get DNF-1.1.9 in RHEL 7 or CentOS 7:Enable EPEL repository for additional DNF dependencies:
# wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
# sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-latest-7*.rpm# cat <<EOF > /etc/yum.repos.d/dnf-stack-el7.repo
[dnf-stack-el7]
name=Copr repo for dnf-stack-el7 owned by @rpm-software-management
baseurl=https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/@rpm-software-management/dnf-stack-el7/epel-7-\$basearch/
skip_if_unavailable=True
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/@rpm-software-management/dnf-stack-el7/pubkey.gpg
enabled=1
enabled_metadata=1
EOF# yum install dnf