THE actual root cause of the man-db transaction failure that killed
three consecutive VM installs (v0.5.26 / v0.5.27 / v0.5.28).
Confirmed via 7-agent research wave:
- Fedora 43 ships RPM 6.0, which changed scriptlet failure
propagation. Scriptlets that previously emitted "Non-critical
error" warnings now bubble up as transaction-level errors. dnf5
issue #2507 documents the change. Anaconda --cmdline mode treats
any 'error' token from the dnf transaction as a fatal abort.
- man-db's `transfiletriggerin` is the canonical trigger: it runs
`systemd-run /usr/bin/systemctl start man-db-cache-update` which
returns non-zero in the anaconda chroot (no PID 1 systemd) and is
flagged as transaction-level error under RPM 6.0.
- We previously patched anaconda's transaction_progress.py on the
BUILD HOST so livecd-creator could finish its own transaction.
That patch lives only on the host running the build — never landed
in the live rootfs the user installs from. Reproduced 3 times:
install-time anaconda on the live ISO is unpatched, hits the same
code path, aborts at exactly "Configuring man-db.x86_64".
Two-layer fix:
1. kickstart %post seds the file inside the live rootfs at build time
so the user's install-time anaconda is patched. Sed downgrades the
'error' token from raise PayloadInstallationError to log.warning.
2. Generated install ks excludes man-db / man-pages / man-pages-overrides
from %packages. Belt-and-braces — even if the patch has an edge
case the trigger never fires because the package isn't installed.
Users install man pages post-firstboot.
Previous attempts that didn't work: dropping the updates repo (only
narrowed the set of failing scriptlets, didn't fix the underlying
RPM-6.0 propagation change); flipping SELinux to permissive
(confirmed not the cause; kickstart's selinux directive only writes
/etc/selinux/config in target root, doesn't affect installer-time).
Follow-up for next release: replicate the transaction_progress patch
in the CI workflow's container so the build itself is deterministic.
Currently the workflow has been greening on luck.
Files: kickstart/veilor-os.ks (+25 lines), overlay/usr/local/bin/veilor-installer (+10 lines).
Verified: bash -n clean, ksvalidator clean.
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