As reported by 'thrice' on IRC, trying to de-select packages in a kickstart doesn't seem to work in Fedora 22.

My test - create a kickstart with this %packages:

%packages
@core
@^workstation-product-environment
-gedit
%end

Run the install. Note these log messages:

/tmp/packaging.log:

14:06:30,995 INFO packaging: skipped removing nonexistant package: gedit
14:06:39,656 INFO packaging: skipped removing nonexistant package: gedit

/tmp/dnf.rpm.log:

Jun 22 13:19:00 INFO Installed: gedit-2:3.16.1-1.fc22.x86_64

(the DNF message actually comes after the packaging.log one, the clock just got changed by an hour in there somewhere).

I believe I know why this happens. Here's what dnfpayload.py implements for de-selecting packages:

    def _apply_selections(self):
...
        for pkg_name in self.data.packages.excludedList:
            try:
                self._remove_package(pkg_name)
                log.info("removed package: %s", pkg_name)
            except packaging.NoSuchPackage:
                log.info("skipped removing nonexistant package: %s", pkg_name)

That's where the 'removing nonexistant package' error comes from, so clearly we're hitting that NoSuchPackage exception. That comes from _remove_package():

    def _remove_package(self, pkg_name):
        try:
            return self._base.remove(pkg_name)
        except dnf.exceptions.PackagesNotInstalledError:
            raise packaging.NoSuchPackage(pkg_name)

so clearly what happens is that gets a PackagesNotInstalledError exception back from DNF. The problem is that DNF's 'remove()' function does not do what anaconda thinks it does. anaconda clearly thinks it means 'take this package out of the list of packages to be installed in this transaction', but that's not at all what it's for. Here it is:

    def remove(self, pkg_spec, reponame=None):
        """Mark the specified package for removal. #:api """

        matches = dnf.subject.Subject(pkg_spec).get_best_query(self.sack)
        installed = [
            pkg for pkg in matches.installed()
            if reponame is None or
            self.yumdb.get_package(pkg).get('from_repo') == reponame]
        if not installed:
            raise dnf.exceptions.PackagesNotInstalledError(
                'no package matched', pkg_spec)

        clean_deps = self.conf.clean_requirements_on_remove
        for pkg in installed:
            self._goal.erase(pkg, clean_deps=clean_deps)
        return len(installed)

i.e. what it really means is 'in this transaction, mark this already-installed package to be erased'. If the package is *not* already installed, it raises the PackagesNotInstalledError exception. Of course, at this point, *no* package is already installed at all - so we're *always* going to get that exception.

To summarize - the problem is that anaconda is asking DNF to uninstall the package, not removing it from the list of packages to be installed.

I'm currently trying to figure out what would be the right way to do this. We could pass the excludedList through to DNF when doing group selections and have a bit of a code to check the excludedList when adding packages that are listed directly, but that's a bigger change than is strictly necessary, I guess?