Sometimes the repodata database stored locally is broken. It happened if same package is released twice (non-signed and signed for example) or when strange network error occur. yum-cron then stops doing updates and reports the same error repeatedly. As yum is configured with many repos, this hits the problem too often. Please, add metadata cleaning to the weekly action. It used to be here and there is only package cleaning (unnecesary as current yum deletes packages on its own but may be required for older yum).
If you do this you want to do "yum clean expire-cache" and not "yum clean metadata" IMO.
Good catch. Will address this as part of reworking things to solve bug 524461. James, what's the advantage of "expire-cache"? I'm inclined to do a "yum clean all", actually.
yum clean all == removes all metadata and all packages from disk. All metadata needed, needs to be downloaded. All packages need to be downloaded. yum clean metadata == removes all metadata. All metadata needed, needs to be downloaded. yum clean expire-cache == all metadata needs to be checked for freshness, if it's it's upto date it requires a minor download (metalink or repomd.xml) if parts of it need to be updated only those bits need to be downloaded. If there is a problem with the download, yum can revert to the old metadata. In the worst case everything is downloaded that is downloaded above.
A test build of yum to try which hopefully resolves this bug: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=135389 Let me know if this either works or causes more trouble.
yum-cron-0.9.0-1.fc11 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 11. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/yum-cron-0.9.0-1.fc11
yum-cron-0.9.0-1.fc10 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 10. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/yum-cron-0.9.0-1.fc10
yum-cron-0.9.0-1.fc12 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 12. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/yum-cron-0.9.0-1.fc12
yum-cron-0.9.0-1.fc11 has been pushed to the Fedora 11 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update yum-cron'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F11/FEDORA-2009-10340
yum-cron-0.9.0-1.fc10 has been pushed to the Fedora 10 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update yum-cron'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F10/FEDORA-2009-10358
yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc11 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 11. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc11
yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc10 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 10. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc10
yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc12 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 12. http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc12
yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc10 has been pushed to the Fedora 10 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update yum-cron'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F10/FEDORA-2009-10519
yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc11 has been pushed to the Fedora 11 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update yum-cron'. You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F11/FEDORA-2009-10541
yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc10 has been pushed to the Fedora 10 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
yum-cron-0.9.1-1.fc11 has been pushed to the Fedora 11 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.