Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 2345
Inappropriate "cannot remove DIR - directory not empty"
Last modified: 2015-01-07 18:37:00 EST
I encounted this when upgrading from gimp-1.0.1-2.i386.rpm to gimp-1.0.4-3.i386.rpm: cannot remove /usr/lib/gimp - directory not empty I get it from time to time with other packages too. The message is inappropriate because /usr/lib/gimp is actually used by the new package. However it is not explicitly listed by the package: the directory /usr/lib/gimp/1.0 is listed, and /usr/lib/gimp is implied by that. I suspect the previous version did have /usr/lib/gimp in the directory list, hence the message. Suggestion: Don't try to delete directories whose existence is implied by other directories from another package. One way would be to add entries for those implied directories to the database, with a flag to say they're implied.
Rpm cannot remove directories that are not empty while attempting to remove a package. Furthermore, the bug is often in the already released package so we cannot always repackage to work around the problem.