Description of problem:

Encountered this on EPEL9, but I assume there's similar/same issues with EPEL8 and EPEL10.

We run a hashicorp vault cluster on EPEL9 and have various vault client installs on other EPEL systems.

This example is from one of the clients (we caught it before it hit the servers). A relatively automatic update caused the vault package to be removed, the "openbao" package to be installed, and FAILED to install openbao-compat-vault.

If we hadn't caught this on the vault cluster servers it would _very likely_ have completely broken that cluster.

# dnf history info 395
Transaction ID : 395
Begin time     : Wed 24 Sep 2025 01:56:26 PM PDT
Begin rpmdb    : b14b09d4b4e64ce3f83124d6de9bc4680502c67fb5cae71649d8dd8b0ddf2a7d
End time       : Wed 24 Sep 2025 01:56:28 PM PDT (2 seconds)
End rpmdb      : 8aad899762d5371af0c56b507c516745b985ff0b790b3318ba6062f726d65f5f
User           : root <root>
Return-Code    : Failure: 1
Releasever     : 9
Command Line   : -y upgrade
Comment        :
Packages Altered:
    Install   openbao-2.4.1-1.el9.x86_64              @epel
 ** Install   openbao-vault-compat-2.4.1-1.el9.x86_64 @epel
    Obsoleted vault-1.20.3-1.x86_64                   @@System
Scriptlet output:
   1 warning: group openbao does not exist - using root
   2 warning: user openbao does not exist - using root
   3 warning: group openbao does not exist - using root
   4 error: unpacking of archive failed on file /etc/vault.d;68d45afa: cpio: File from package already exists as a directory in system
   5 error: openbao-vault-compat-2.4.1-1.el9.x86_64: install failed
   6 Creating group 'openbao' with GID 978.
   7 Creating user 'openbao' (openbao secrets manager) with UID 978 and GID 978.

# rpm -qa vault\* openbao\*
openbao-2.4.1-1.el9.x86_64

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
2.4.1-1

How reproducible:
Very

Steps to Reproduce:
1. yum install -y yum-utils
2. yum-config-manager --disable epel
3. yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/RHEL/hashicorp.repo
4. yum -y install vault
5. yum-config-manager --enable epel
6. yum update

Actual results:
vault removed
openbao installed
error installing openbao-vault-compat

Expected results:
no openbao packages installed and vault left installed.

Additional info: