Description of problem: If yum is interrupted or dies before it can do the cleanup phase after the package installations, it leaves duplicate entries in the rpm database that must be cleaned manually with rpm -e Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always. During a yum update, if the machine is interrupted during the cleanup phase for any reason (controlling terminal died, kernel panic because of too little ram in a xen image, etc), packages that have not hit the cleanup stage have duplicates in the rpm database. Also, doing yum update over an ssh connection and losing the connection midway through the yum update causes this frequently. Steps to Reproduce: 1. run yum update 2. yum dies in the middle (killed or controlling terminal crashes) 3. rpm -qa and notice duplicates Actual results: duplicate packages Expected results: I'd expect yum to be able to clean itself up on the next run or something. Additional info: See bug 21944 (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=219444). Now that yum is in RH 5, this is becoming a more critical problem. If I install a bunch of packages with rpm -ivh, it installs and cleans up packages one at a time instead of batching all the operations. Why can't yum do the same thing? Is it too slow?
Bug type above! the bug referenced is bug 219444.
This is a hard feature to add, esp. for a RHEL-5.x update. However starting with RHEL-5.1 we have included the yum-utils package which includes the package-cleanup program, so there is a better method of "recovery" than rpm -e.