Comment 14 for bug 913221

Yes, this is expected and has always been the case, rpm doesn't even try to track dependencies during the transaction. There must be a dozen duplicates of this around bugzilla :)

While the "right thing to do" looks (and would be) easyish to achieve in a trivial case like the example here, things get ugly real fast when the transactions become more complex. Such as packages with dependency loops, eg pkg1 and pkg2 that depend on each other, installation of first one succeeds but the latter fails -> there's no way to truly undo what the installation of the first one might have done (through scripts etc). And then consider dependency loops consisting of large number of packages (IIRC Centos 5.x has dep loops involving > 20 packages in the core package set) and what should happen if one of them fails... etc.

"Right thing" being not always achievable doesn't have to mean we couldn't do it when it's possible though.