May I safely execute yum-complete-transaction?

[Seth Vidal]

On Sun, 15 Nov 2009, Paul Johnson wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Clemens Eisserer <linuxhippy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I had a power shortage while I ran "yum update". After booting up, yum
>> told me to run yum-complete-transaction.
>>
>> However yum-complete-transaction reported (see attachement), it would:
>> Install       7 Package(s)
>> Upgrade     205 Package(s)
>> Remove      209 Package(s)
>>
>> So I canceld, afraid of having a lot of stiff accidentially removed.
>>
>> Is it safe to let yum-complete-transaction continue?
>>
>> Thanks, Clemens
>>
>
> Watch out!
>
> Same happened to me and I mistakenly let it proceed.  It removed lots
> and lots of VITAL packages.  As far as I can see, it acted as if it
> has installed the new updates, but it had not.  Then it removed very
> imprortant things and it was very difficult to recover.
>
> I'd like to know how to "clear" the yum system so that
> yum-complete-transaction does not think it needs to "help" me any
> more.

yum-complete-transaction --cleanup-only

which is in the --help output.

Also if you have a good case could you run the latest 
yum-complete-transaction from here:

http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb?p=yum-utils.git;a=blob_plain;f=yum-complete-transaction.py;hb=c5fae0afe3f88a66757a432657d765c343e7bd4d

it adds some more error checking and in my tests it does a pretty good 
job.

thanks,
-sv