Description of problem:

dnf has some foot-shooting protection to avoid screwing up your system too hard, where it states "The operation would result in removing the following protected packages". Unfortunately, this protection doesn't extend to the "subscription-manager" package on RHEL.

This should really be in the protected list, as without it, you lose access to the repos and hence cannot reinstall it. It's almost functionally equivalent to removing dnf itself.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

dnf-4.10.0-5.el9_0.noarch

How reproducible:

100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. sudo dnf remove subscription-manager

Actual results:

subscription-manager is removed, breaking dnf.

Expected results:

dnf refuses to proceed since subscription-manager is essential for its operation.

Additional info:

This is a bit of an odd corner case, but since dnf has the "protected packages" mechanism, I figured I'd report it.

We stumbled upon this when testing correct behaviour of our software in the absence of python3-gobject. Removing that also nuked subscription-manager, which we didn't notice until dnf stopped working.