[ILUG] RPM Problems

[John P. Looney]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 09:55:45AM +0100, Dermot Daly mentioned:
> Hi All,
> I was trying to remove my mysql package from my system yesterday.  I ran
> the necessary command rpm -e -p <package name>
> 
> This ran overnight, but did not comeplete (with no output).
> 
> So...This morning I killed the rpm process, and am now tring to re-build
> the rpm database.
> 
> Command like 
> rpm --verbose --initdb or
> rpm --verbose --rebuilddb are producing no output and appear to be doing
> nothing.
> 
> Is this correct ?  Any pointers?

 Er, --initdb as far as I know initialises a fresh database, and wipes
whatever was there already. --rebuilddb does a rebuild from what's there
already (and unless there is a problem, will not produce any messages).

 If you ran initdb, you likely wiped the configuration. I'm not sure does
it wipe the package headers too (which --rebuilddb uses to rebuild the
database). To give an idea of how big the files would be:

[root at krusty rpm]# ls -lrt
total 15831
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         12288 Oct 14 15:06 Conflictname
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         98304 Oct 14 15:06 Requirename
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         90112 Oct 14 15:06 Providename
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         24576 Oct 14 15:06 Name
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         12288 Oct 14 15:06 Group
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm        368640 Oct 14 15:06 Dirnames
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm       2723840 Oct 14 15:06 Basenames
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         24576 Oct 14 15:06 Sigmd5
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         45056 Oct 14 15:06 Sha1header
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         57344 Oct 14 15:06 Requireversion
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         36864 Oct 14 15:06 Provideversion
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         12288 Oct 14 15:06 Installtid
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm       2662400 Oct 14 15:06 Filemd5s
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm         12288 Oct 14 15:06 Triggername
-rw-r--r--    1 rpm      rpm      10993664 Oct 17 04:02 Packages
[root at krusty rpm]# 

 If they are signifigantly smaller than these, I'd say you had trouble.

 I've never seen "-e -p" used. Strange. 

 If a command runs slowly, rebuilding its database would not be my first
course of action. strace or ltrace would have been a little more helpful
-it could also be that rpm was trying to run an external command to shut
down the database (which could have hung). In which case, pstree would
have shown what commands rpm had spawned to remove the package.

John