rpm forgets to look at obsoletes when installing/updating a package. As a result it will happily install an obsoleted package on a system that already includes the package that obsoletes it This should at minima be treated as a conflict. If a packager declared his package obsoletes some other package, he does not expect them to be installed on the same system. That will usually result in breakage. rpm-4.6.0-5.fc11.x86_64
(see also yum bug #486566)
Obsoletes are not saved persistently, and are applied only as an event in the current transaction. RPM has always behaved this way ...
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 11 development cycle. Changing version to '11'. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
This is now implemented upstream. No plans to backport this to existing releases though, as its quite a significant behavior change, Fedora will get it through next major rpm update (possibly in F14 timeframe)
Thanks for the fixing!
Fixed in rawhide as of rpm-4.9.0-0.beta1.1.fc15.