Shouldn't it be made clear the "dnf system-upgrade clean" deletes update files after running "dnf system-upgrade download"?

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1

I looked at the instructions on https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/, but after running sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=39, I got this:

Download complete! Use dnf system-upgrade reboot to start the upgrade.

To remove cached metadata and transaction use dnf system-upgrade clean

The downloaded packages were saved in cache until the next successful transaction.

You can remove cached packages by executing dnf clean packages.

I thought I should run dnf system-upgrade clean to remove any misc junk or cache, that’s what I interpreted the command to do based off of the description, and then restart. I did and then got the message fedora system is not ready for upgrade after trying to reboot.

Shouldn’t it be made clearer that system-upgrade clean delete the files that were just downloaded for the upgrade?! Perhaps instead say something like “To delete files for upgrading use dnf system-upgrade clean”.

2

That command probably should have been called ‘cancel’. ‘clean’ describes how it’s implemented, but it’s too literal.

You can file an issue about improving the wording here: GitHub - rpm-software-management/dnf-plugins-core: Core DNF Plugins

Something like this would be better:

To cancel the upgrade, use dnf system-upgrade clean

dnf4 is being replaced by dnf5, but dnf5 doesn’t yet have a system-upgrade replacement: Implement system-upgrade command · Issue #1052 · rpm-software-management/dnf5 · GitHub

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3

I would read that as literal.

The first line says how to complete the upgrade.
The following lines tell the user how to perform different tasks and provides information.
Actually the last line is not related to the system-upgrade process at all since dnf clean packages' acts on the normal dnf cache tree ( /var/cache/dnf ) and dnf system-upgrade clean` works on the upgrade tree ( /var/lib/dnf )

Normal dnf cache is in /