After completing an in-place upgrade from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44, dnf5 failed to run with this error:

[lisa@fedora05 ~]# dnf5 update
Cannot load dnf5 plugin: /usr/lib64/dnf5/plugins/automatic_cmd_plugin.so
Cannot load shared library “/usr/lib64/dnf5/plugins/automatic_cmd_plugin.so”: libdnf5-cli.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

What happened

The Fedora 44 upgrade completed, and the installed dnf5 packages were all current Fedora 44 versions. However, there was a leftover plugin file still sitting in /usr/lib64/dnf5/plugins/automatic_cmd_plugin.so.

That file was not owned by any RPM package and had been built against an older library, libdnf5-cli.so.2.

But Fedora 44 had /usr/lib64/libdnf5-cli.so.3.

dnf5 was trying to load a stale plugin from before the upgrade.

How I verified it

These commands showed the problem:

ls -l /usr/lib64/libdnf5-cli.so*
rpm -qf /usr/lib64/dnf5/plugins/automatic_cmd_plugin.so
ldd /usr/lib64/dnf5/plugins/automatic_cmd_plugin.so

Results:

• libdnf5-cli.so.3 existed
• automatic_cmd_plugin.so was not owned by any package
• ldd showed it was looking for libdnf5-cli.so.2

Fix

Remove the orphaned plugin file:

rm /usr/lib64/dnf5/plugins/automatic_cmd_plugin.so
ldconfig
dnf5 update

After deleting the stale plugin, dnf5 worked normally again.

Root cause

This appears to be a leftover orphaned dnf5 plugin from before the major version upgrade. Even though the main dnf5 and libdnf5 packages were updated correctly, dnf5 still tried to load the old .so file it found in the plugins directory.