What were you trying to do that didn't work?

Uninstall a package that I have installed previously

What is the impact of this issue to you?

Breaks automation

Please provide the package NVR for which the bug is seen:

dnf-4.20.0-9.el10.noarch

dnf-4.14.0-21.el9.noarch

dnf5-5.2.8.1-3.fc41.x86_64

How reproducible is this bug?:

100%

Steps to reproduce

1. take a EL9 or EL10 container
2. dnf install cockpit-system
3. dnf remove cockpit-system

Expected results

cockpit-system and the dependencies that were installed for it are removed, if some of the dependencies are protected, those remain but the overall removal works

Actual results

Error: 
 Problem: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: grub2-tools-minimal, sudo, systemd-udev
(try to add '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages or '--nobest' to use not only best candidate packages)

Additional information

This happens not only with cockpit and grub, but with every dependency chain that contains a protected package that would be removed as nothing else depends on it anymore, cockpit/grub is just taken here as an example as it's trivial to reproduce in a minimal container.

This also happens on Fedora 41 with dnf5 – e.g. using the fedora:41 container, installing container-selinux which pulls in the protected selinux-policy-targeted and then trying to remove container-selinux again.