Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again

If you get this error, and you were running rawhide, do not worry. Just edit your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo file (again?) and change it from enabled=1 back to enabled=0. During the recent release of Fedora, yum has re-enabled your fedora.repo that you had previous disabled.

As of this blog post, it was the Fedora 12 release that did this again. The Fedora 11 release did the same thing. And, no, Debian Sid does not do this to you. I have been on Debian Sid for years, and it has never enabled any repos without at least prompting me first.

The folks on #fedora or #fedora-qa will not believe you though. They will taunt you with phrases like, "normal updates for thousands of people are working just fine", or "there are thousands and thousands of people who had their repo files updated, and they continue to get updates". But don't be discouraged by their "talk to the hand" attitude. Just edit your fedora.repo and set enabled back to 0, and move on with your life, and join me ... I am not one of the thousands and thousands of people who have never had a problem with updating a linux box.

You would not be on this page if your search engine had not led you here. I can tell from the referrers to this page. So I know you are just like me, just some idiot who is having problems udating their fedora rawhide box. We are walking together in this way. We are alike. Do not let the folks in the Linux community convince you that you are the only one on earth who has ever had a problem using their distro.

Note: the root cause of the error "Cannot retrieve metalink for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again" seems to be some kind of dns issue see this bug report. Again, I did not get this error again after re-disabling the fedora.repo and continued using rawhide.