Unhelpful error message on dnf system-upgrade

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1

Hi all

I am stuck on the following issue:

I am running

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=43 --allowerasing

only to get the message below, which does not specify which package is eventually causing the issue. the transaction seems to silently fail because of this, so I cannot upgrade the machine (workstation f42 → f43)

[3156/3156] Total                                                                                                                                                           100% |   8.7 MiB/s |   4.5 GiB |  08m54s
Testing offline transaction
Package was not found in rpm database

so far, I have tried:

  1. looking at the logs in /var/log/dnf.log → nothing of interest there it seems
  2. rpm --rebuilddb → the problem persists

any idea on how to find which package is creating trouble?
thanks in advance!

3

My guess is you install an RPM that did not come from any of the repos you have confugured.
Something you downloaded and install from a .rpm file?

Is that something you might have done?

1 Like
4

2350483 – "Package not found in rpm-database"

5

I reconstructed what happened, at least superficially.

some days ago I tried the graphical upgrade method.

after the fc43 download the usual dialog “restart and install” appeared, but it contained a warning message about keybase being “not compatible with fc43 and hence will be removed”.
clicking “restart and install” would just close the dialog and do nothing.

I moved to terminal, run dnf system-upgrade and got the OP cryptic message for the first time.

rebooted just in case, same thing on both GUI and terminal.

removed keybase, same thing on both GUI and terminal.

rebooted, same thing on terminal, while the GUI update worked. so, proceeded with the latter, upgraded to fc43. (btw, just reinstalled keybase and it seems to work fine so far.)

not sure what actually went wrong behind the scenes, but whatever was throwing that “Package not found…” message should probably be modified to provide a more descriptive message (e.g. “which package” was not found).