The "404 Not Found" page on fedora.redhat.com is actually served up with HTTP error code "200 OK". When yum attempts to retrieve a file from download.fedora.redhat.com that is not available, a 302 redirect to fedora.redhat.com/404.html is returned. yum downloads this HTML file as if it were the real file. In the particular case I am seeing at the moment, http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/5/SRPMS/repodata/repomd.xml is not available. This means yum replaces the locally cached repomd.xml file and tries to parse it as XML, rather than just moving on to the next download URL. The 404.html page should be served up with HTTP error code 404 instead.
Confirmed. I'm not sure that we can effectively correct this issue on the current system. The setup we use for the PHP scripts prevents passing a 404 status from the PHP script. Apache's error redirect is what is currently being used, and I'm not sure if that can be made to handle the job. We can either find a solution or hold off until fedora.redhat.com is killed off.
Hi, this should have been fixed a while ago :-) Closing this bug.