Description of problem:

This is a longish story, and I'm not sure where I should report this 
bug... Anyway, 
I was upgrading my Fedora Core Development installation with yum 
command

  yum --exclude=xorg\* --exclude=anaconda --exclude=gdm 
--exclude=kdebase --exclude=kde\* --exclude=chkfontpath 
--exclude=XFree86\* --exclude=epiphany --exclude=gkrellm 
--exclude=rpmdb-fedora update

in preparation to move from XFree86 to x-org. At the time, I only had 
Fedora Devel base path in my yum.conf. yum downloaded the rpms 
slowly, but hell broke loose when rpm begun installing the first 
packages. Basically, glibc-common and 
glibc didn't install properly:

  glibc-common 100 % done 4/208 
  error: unpacking of archive failed on file 
/usr/lib/locale/zh_CN/LC_PAPER: cpio link exists
  warning: /etc/ld.so.conf created as /etc/ld.so.conf.rpmnew

  glibc 100 % done 5/208 
  error: unpacking of archive failed on file /lib/ld-2.3.3.so: cpio: 
open

and after that, most of the rpm installs were fubar, because rpm 
could not execute 
anything due to missing ls-linux.so.2:

  pango 100 % done 7/208 
  error: %post(pango-1.4.0-1) scriptlet failed, exit status 255

I had left yum running by itself (as the upgrade took about 5 hours), 
so it
kept on going these fubared installs for about 100 rpm's before it 
mis-upgraded python
and sigbus'ed:

  zsh: bus error  yum --exclude=xorg\* --exclude=anaconda 
--exclude=gdm --excl

I found out that /lib/ld-linux.so.2, /lib/ld-2.2.3.so and 
/lib/tls/libc.so.6 were
missing. Through various LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LD_PRELOAD, 
"/backup/lib/ld-linux.so.2 /bin/cp ..." and ash.static hacks I was 
able to restore so much glibc libraries that I could try 
to reinstall the rpm's.

I verified the glibc rpm signatures, and md5 sums were ok. Installing 
glibc-utils-2.3.3-18, glibc-headers-2.3.3-18, glibc-2.3.3-18, 
glibc-devel-2.3.3-18, glibc-common-2.3.3-18 didn't prove easy, 
though. I got the same errors and lost the libraries again. The same 
story when trying to the previous glibc-2.3.3-16. 

This is using rpm-4.3-0.22 and rpm-4.3-0.20 (it was upgraded in the 
process.) I reinstalled 
rpm-4.3-0.22 with rpm -Uvh --force before retrying.) The original 
glibc problem happaned with rpm-4.3-0.20 (glibc was upgraded before 
rpm).

Basically it, appeared that rpm had become completely unable to 
handle cases where it should replace a file with a link, replace a 
running binary/library, or anything non-trivial. After I did rm -rf 
/usr/lib/locale and some other offending files, I was able to install 
glibc*. However, the same problems continued when I reinstalled the 
misinstalled rpm's:

 python 100 % done 18/208 
 error: unpacking of archive failed on file /usr/bin/python: cpio: 
link
 gcc-c++ 100 % done 82/208
 error: unpacking of archive failed on file /usr/bin/c++: cpio: link
 e2fsprogs-devel 100 % done 69/208
 error: unpacking of archive failed on file 
/usr/share/man/man3/uuid_generate.3.gz 
 emacs 100 % done 96/208 
 error: unpacking of archive failed on file /usr/bin/emacs: cpio: 
link

and reinstalling SysVinit complained that /sbin/init textfile was 
busy. Well, duh!

(Sorry for the possibly inexact error messages, the rxvt where I 
cut'n'pasted these from 
was a bit garbled.)

So, all in all, I'm not sure if this is a bug in the rpm packages, 
rpm itself, yum, or perhaps in cpio. I would suspect rpm. But is 
quite serious.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
rpm-python-4.3-0.22 / 4.3-0.20
rpm-build-4.3-0.22 / 4.3-0.20
rpm-4.3-0.22 / 4.3-0.20
glibc-utils-2.3.3-18 (2.3.3-16 before upgrade)
glibc-2.3.3-18 (2.3.3-16 before upgrade)
glibc-devel-2.3.3-18 (2.3.3-16 before upgrade)
glibc-common-2.3.3-18 (2.3.3-16 before upgrade)
yum-2.0.6-1

How reproducible:
the rpm problem still happens (it fails to replace file with links 
etc).