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I'm upgrading from Fedora 22 to 23 right now, using dnf.

There is a guide on fedoraproject.org how to basically do that: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade

The system has now rebooted, and dnf is installing the packages right now, however, I need to interrupt the upgrade process.

The problems I'm a bit concerned about, is whether upgrade will resume normally after powering down the machine and rebooting later.

Is it safe to do so, or will my installation end up garbled, i.e. a mongrel of Fedora 22 and 23?

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  • Well, it turns out it's not safe at all. The upgrade process failed while dnf was in the "cleanup" stage. I'm working on a contingency solution right now. – polemon Nov 26 '15 at 18:45
  • Generally, it's not safe to interrupt any update or upgrade process. In fact, doing so will render your system unusable in many cases and formatting your drive and reinstalling a new system will probably be necessary afterwards. – basic6 Dec 25 '16 at 19:26
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I wouldn't recommend to do such thing hence it is not safe for the system at all.

It may break the system and you may not be able to start it and will have plenty trouble in getting it back.

Why would you interrupt the installation?

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  • Beyond my control. Might call it a power failure. – polemon Nov 26 '15 at 18:44
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So as I've described in my question, it was during the "cleanup" process when my computer powered down - albeit gracefully, dnf didn't take it too well.

The cleanup stage removes old packages from the system, as the new ones are already installed. This is kind of a problem, when trying to do a dnf distro-sync. While it will fix package clashes, it won't downgrade some of the packages.

My system - or more specifically dnf was still assuming it's on Fedora 22, which it kinda is and is not at the same time; but the fact that it thinks that, is quite helpful.

Because the newer packages are already installed and some of the old ones delted, it makes more sense to push to the newer release, as Fedora 22 was already missing packages (since update was already cleaning up).

when running dnf distro-sync --releasever=23 you'll run into dnf not wanting to uninstall some of the (new) packages, because they're protected.

This problem can be somewhat easily circumvented, with dnf distro-sync --disableplugin=protected_packages --releasever=23. The reason for that is, that some of the allready installed fc23-packages are already there and protected (one of which, is dnf itself, for example). But the old fc22 package of dnf hadn't been cleaned up yet. It's still installed and protected.

Since the upgrade process was halted pretty much mid-removing the old files, there are numerous version clashes between the fc22 and fc23 versions, respectively.

Some of these clashes can be circumvented by using an additional --allowerasing switch, which helped a little. In the end though, I had to remove most of the clashes myself, which meant going package-by-package and removing the problematic ones. I ended up removing all texlive-* packages before moving on, it sped up the process of upgrading - failure - retrying, and made going through installed packages much easier.

Eventually, a dnf upgrade --refresh --releasever=23 --allowerasing installed a bunch of upgrades and pointed me to the few remaining version errors. After that, booting into Fedora 23 was no problem.

It should be noted, that the solution would be somewhat different, if I was in the "installation"/"upgrading" stage of the process, when the power fail occurred. I'd have probably distro-synced back to Fedora 22, removed all the fc23 packages and started anew.

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