This issue was reported on #rpm, and is likely gonna be commonly  
encountered.

Traditionally, RPM dependency relations order packages on bootstrap  
installs like this:

	setup		contains /etc/passwd and nothing else
	basesystem	no files, the version was "supposed" to be the distro  
release
	filesystem	containing the directory skeleton for the file systems.

But note that when parentdir relations are used for ordering (as in  
rpm-5.1.7+), that
setup implicitly acquires an ordering hint equivalent to
	Requires: /etc
because setup contains the file /etc/passwd, which will depend on its  
parentdir.

Since /etc is contained in the filesystem package, the filesystem
package is ordered before setup. That's almost perfectly OK, but
the file system package also needs to look up users/groups, which
need /etc/passwd installed, so ideally setup (or whatever installs
/etc/passwd) must be first. OTOH, the filesystem package (or
whatever carries the directory skeleton) typically has root:root
ownership which is hardwired within rpmio/ugid.c cached lookups.

But if anything whatsoever in the filesystem package depends on
the setup package, then there's a loop, and rpmtsOrder() will delay
attempting to install order either setup <-> filesystem until its way
way too late. The failure symptom will include many obscure messages  
from lots of
other packages. The flaw is that setup/filesystem _MUST_ be installed
as early as possible.

One can either fix setup/filesystem packages to not loop, or
one can add dependency ordering whiteout to specify which
of setup or filesystem should be installed first.

hth

73 de Jeff