Did I say that I don't like yum? I think I did and others did, too.

So this yum upgrade failed due to insufficient diskspace and yum exited with:

/usr/sbin/build-locale-archive: cannot add to locale archive: No such file or directory
could not write to ts_done file: [Errno 28] No space left on device
[...]
Error unpacking rpm package imsettings-libs-1.2.6-1.fc16.x86_64
error: gtk2-2.24.8-2.fc16.x86_64: install failed
error: unpacking of archive failed on file \
  /usr/lib64/libimsettings.so.5.2.0;4ed44d97: cpio: write
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/rpmtrans.py", line 444, in callback
    self._instCloseFile(  bytes, total, h )
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/rpmtrans.py", line 507, in _instCloseFile
    self._scriptout(txmbr.po)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/rpmtrans.py", line 246, in _scriptout
    self.base.history.log_scriptlet_output(data, msgs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/history.py", line 871, in log_scriptlet_output
    self._commit()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/yum/history.py", line 640, in _commit
    return self._conn.commit()
sqlite3.OperationalError: database or disk is full
error: python callback > failed, aborting!

OK, no big deal. Just resized the root partition so that enough space is available now and try again:

$ yum upgrade
[...]
There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running \
yum-complete-transaction first to finish them.
[...]
Error: Protected multilib versions: glibc-2.14.90-19.x86_64 != glibc-2.14.90-14.i686

This didn't go so well. Let's try yum-complete-transaction then, as suggested:

$ yum-complete-transaction
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
There are 1 outstanding transactions to complete. Finishing the most recent one
The remaining transaction had 87 elements left to run
Package glibc-common-2.14.90-19.x86_64 already installed and latest version
[...]
--> Processing Dependency: libc.so.6()(64bit) for package: elfutils-0.152-1.fc16.x86_64
--> Processing Dependency: /bin/sh for package: kernel-3.1.2-1.fc16.x86_64
[....]

This goes on for quite a while, hours even. I went to bed at this time, only to see the next morning that yum got killed by the out-of-memory killer:

Out of memory: Kill process 1457 (yum-complete-tr) score 782 or sacrifice child
Killed process 1457 (yum-complete-tr) total-vm:1643616kB, anon-rss:830884kB, file-rss:0kB

The VM has 1 GB RAM and 512 MB swap - not too much, but certainly enough for doing an upgrade, I assumed. OK, so how to go on from here? With yum-complete-transaction failing, I decided to cleanup any old transactions and start from scratch:

$ yum-complete-transaction --cleanup-only
Cleaning up unfinished transaction journals
$ yum-complete-transaction
No unfinished transactions left.

But now the upgrade would stop with:

$ yum upgrade
[...]
Error: Protected multilib versions: glibc-2.14.90-19.x86_64 != glibc-2.14.90-14.i686

Using --setopt=protected_multilib=false (and --skip-broken) brought us only little further:

$ yum upgrade --setopt=protected_multilib=false --skip-broken
[...]
Transaction Check Error:
  file /usr/share/doc/glibc-2.14.90/NEWS conflicts between attempted
  installs of glibc-2.14.90-14.i686 and glibc-2.14.90-19.x86_64

Moving /usr/share/doc/glibc-2.14.90/NEWS out of the way did not help in this case. What did help was to "remove" the conflicting package from the package database. Of course, we could not really delete glibc, since it's needed for pretty much everything:

$ rpm --erase --nodeps --noscripts --justdb glibc-2.14.90-14.x86_64
$ yum upgrade --setopt=protected_multilib=false --skip-broken
[...]

This went through successfully and the system is now properly updated and even survived a reboot. Just in case that it's still not clear from these notes: I find it unacceptable that yum is having such a hard time finding out how to do the Right Thing^TM after a failed transaction. And yes, I've been using apt-get for years now - never had anything remotely similar to this mess. Incredible, I cannot understand how people can work with that. I mean, really work. I'm using Fedora only for playing around and while I really like some of the approaches Fedora is going for, this yum crap is a major show stopper for me to ever adopt any rpm-based distribution. I'd rather do ports :-\

Oh, apparently there's still one thing left to clean up:

$ yum check
Loaded plugins: changelog, langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
glibc-common-2.14.90-14.x86_64 has missing requires of glibc = ('0', '2.14.90', '14')
glibc-common-2.14.90-19.x86_64 is a duplicate with glibc-common-2.14.90-14.x86_64

In my case, "package-cleanup --cleandupes" solved this one. Sigh...