1. try to update packages from command line 2. fail because "Another app is currently holding the yum lock;" 3. service yum-updatesd stop 4. note that "Another app is currently holding the yum lock;" still. 5. ps ax |grep yum and note that yum-updatesd-helper is still running. 6. kill the pid 7. finally yum from the shell proceeds.
Indiscriminately killing the helper process is a good way to lead to hosed rpmdbs if the user has configured yum-updatesd to automatically apply updates. So just killing it is the wrong thing to do.
Maybe we should add a note to the shutdown command if the process is still locked. So: if yum-updatesd is holding the yum lock output a 'process is running cannot be shutdown safely' or somesuch message?
We've switched yum to retry if it encounters a held lock.