After using preupgrade to go from F9 to F11, "rpm -qa | grep fc9 |sort" produced: bluez-libs-debuginfo-3.36-1.fc9.i386 gnome-spell-1.0.8-5.fc9.i386 libpng-debuginfo-1.2.37-1.fc9.i386 libtiff-debuginfo-3.8.2-13.fc9.i386 libXfontcache-1.0.4-5.fc9.i386 libXfontcache-debuginfo-1.0.4-5.fc9.i386 libXTrap-1.0.0-5.fc9.i386 libXTrap-debuginfo-1.0.0-5.fc9.i386 microcode_ctl-debuginfo-1.17-1.45.fc9.i386 ntp-debuginfo-4.2.4p7-1.fc9.i386 pidgin-debuginfo-2.5.8-1.fc9.i386 smartmontools-config-5.38-2.fc9.i386 These are all system packages which I did not install manually, so I would have expected the installer to either upgrade them or erase them. If I am expected to remove such packages manually (for example by running "package-cleanup --orphans") that should be documented at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_PreUpgrade (which I can do if that's the case). smartmontools-config in particular caused problems with "yum update" (see bug 521365), and "preupgrade" seemed to have some trouble with it. (See attached log.)
Created attachment 360342 [details] Output from preupgrade, captured from gnome-terminal
debuginfo packages are never cleaned up - you can see the same behavior with yum. The rest of these packages are likely dead, but not obsoleted by anything. That's at least the case gnome-spell. We preserve these packages because it's possible they are still being used by something on the system like something you've installed manually. Anyway, we don't even have the information to know that a package is old and should be removed unless it's been obsoleted by another package.
I added a note to the wiki documentation that these packages should be removed manually, then.