F15: Erased rpm database!! What now?

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2011 08:19:28 -0500
Dave Ihnat <dihnat at dminet.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 03:01:16PM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> > This is of no use whatsoever in this situation, it doesn't help 
> > reconstructing the accidentally erased rpmdb contents.
> > <<suggestions elided>>
> 
> Hmm...single point of failure...Bad Thing(TM).

You cannot make a system completely idiot proof. It's already a
transactional database to protect against corruption but if someone
deletes it or mistakenly reformats their hard disk there are limits to
what can be done to bulletproof it.

If you have a backup restore it, if not I guess it wasn't a single point
of failure ... you had at least two failures. Time to back up the
user data, re-install and restore the user data on top.

You can do clever stuff with rpm --dbonly but it's probably less work
long term to do the backup/reinstall cycle.

Alan