I'm using OpenSUSE factory, recently I decided to zypper dup; I was low on disk
space, but zypper continued. It seems to have failed at upgrading zypper itself
and this corrupted libzypp library. After freeing space I had to upgrade a
similar box and then scp over libzypp libraries and binaries over to my system.
After this 'zypper dup' still had issues upgrading, in particular my GNOME
environment came to its knees and wanted to abort. After this I could not boot
regularly.

To fix, I had to boot into single user mode (appending S to my kernel
parameters), then dhcp, and zypper dup on the console while on Ethernet.

A few issues then:

1) zypper should do a computation of needed disk space and not install unless
you clear the space. That would be the proactive solution. 

2) We need a test plan to include testing 'zypper dup' on low disk space; have
it fail and then purposely corrupt libzyppp library 'echo FOO >
/usr/lib64/libzypp.so.1600' is an example.

3) There is an unknown upgrade issue with low disk space and GNOME where it can
leave your system in a state that even if you have libzypp and zypper properly
installed, 'zypper dup' eventually causes GNOME to crash, and a regular boot up
no longer works. I cannot be sure what exactly occurred to trigger such an
issue.. but I figure I had installed circa OpenSUSE 13.2 material, and I did a
zypper dup. So *maybe* this can be reproduced by testing a 'zypper dup' upgrade
from opensuse 13.2 to factory, failing on low disk space, corrupting libzypp.. 

I think addressing 1) properly would satisfy my concerns as 2) and 3) are
secondary issues.