Trying to update my system this morning, PackageKit came up with a slightly bizarre error along the lines of "Backend cannot handle this operation", which made me think PackageKit itself was somehow broken. Going to the command line, a conary update fails: $ sudo conary updateall Password: Unable to open database /var/lib/conarydb: journal file exists. use revert command to undo the previous (failed) operation I know the front-end of PK is quite separate from the back-end, but it would be much better if this could somehow be handled more gracefully. The 'revert' did sort the db out, so perhaps it could optionally run that after asking, or at least tell the user more clearly what the problem is.