I upgrade Fedora on my office and home workstations through an online upgrade with dnf , and as part of this I read (or at least scan) DNF's output to look for problems. Usually this goes okay, but DNF5 has a general problem with script output and when I did a test upgrade from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42 on a virtual machine, it generated a huge amount of repeated output from a script run by selinux-policy-targeted, repeatedly reporting "Old compiled fcontext format, skipping" for various .bin files in /etc/selinux/targeted/contexts/files. The volume of output made the rest of DNF's output essentially unreadable. I would like to avoid this when I actually upgrade my office and home workstations to Fedora 42 (which I still haven't done, partly because of this issue).

( You can't make this output easier to read because DNF5 is too smart for you . This particular error message reportedly comes from 'semodule -B', per this Fedora discussion .)

The 'targeted' policy is one of several SELinux policies that are supported or at least packaged by Fedora (although I suspect I might see similar issues with the other policies too). My main machines don't use SELinux and I have it completely disabled, so in theory I should be able to remove the selinux-policy-targeted package to stop it from repeatedly complaining during the Fedora 42 upgrade process. In practice, selinux-policy-targeted is a 'protected' package that DNF will normally refuse to remove. Such packages are listed in /etc/dnf/protected.d/ in various .conf files; selinux-policy-targeted installs (well, includes) a .conf file to protect itself from removal once installed.

(Interestingly, sudo protects itself but there's nothing specifically protecting su and the rest of util-linux. I suspect util-linux is so pervasively a dependency that other protected things hold it down, or alternately no one has ever worried about people removing it and shooting themselves in the foot.)

I can obviously remove this .conf file and then DNF will let me remove selinux-policy-targeted, which will force the removal of some other SELinux policy packages (both selinux-policy packages themselves and some '*-selinux' sub-packages of other packages). I tried this on another Fedora 41 test virtual machine and nothing obvious broke, but that doesn't mean that nothing broke at all. It seems very likely that almost no one tests Fedora without the selinux-policy collective installed and I suspect it's not a supported configuration.

I could reduce my risks by removing the packages only just before I do the upgrade to Fedora 42 and put them back later (well, unless I run into a dnf issue as a result , although that issue is from 2024). Also, now that I've investigated this, I could in theory delete the .bin files in /etc/selinux/targeted/contexts/files before the upgrade, hopefully making it so that selinux-policy-targeted has less or nothing to complain about. Since I'm not using SELinux, hopefully the lack of these files won't cause any problems, but of course this is less certain a fix than removing selinux-policy-targeted (for example, perhaps the .bin files would get automatically rebuilt early on in the upgrade process as packages are shuffled around, and bring the problem back with them).

Really, though, I wish DNF5 didn't have its problem with script output. All of this is hackery to deal with that underlying issue.