rhpl update problem and rpmdb problem(s) (was Re: What is the current F14 state?)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 11:18 -0600, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 02:44:00PM +0200, Michał Piotrowski wrote:
> > e2fsprogs-1.41.10-7.fc13.i686 has missing requires of libss.so.2
> > e2fsprogs-1.41.12-5.fc13.x86_64 is a duplicate with
> > e2fsprogs-1.41.10-7.fc13.x86_64
> ....
> > 
> > Is there any way to remove these warnings? These versions are no
> > longer in the system AFAICT.
> 
> Aparently they are; at least as far as rpmdb is concerned.  It looks
> like that you have quite a number of duplicates which suggests that
> a "Cleanup" phase was not finished.
> 
> Running 'package-cleanup --cleandupes' would likely help.  After

I'd highly recommend being very cautious about that, because what this
seems to do is actually remove the package. That is, if you have
foobar-1.1 installed and foobar-1.0 as a 'ghost' in the RPM database,
after doing package-cleanup --cleandupes , you will have no 'foobar'
package installed at all. I comprehensively screwed over a system by
using --cleandupes once.

What's better to do in the case of having a 'ghost' package in the
database - it's not really 'installed' in the sense of the files being
there on the disk, but it's in the database - is 'rpm -e --justdb
--noscripts' . There may be an equivalent parameter for
package-cleanup , I'm not sure.

It may be that --cleandupes usually does the right thing and I just got
unlucky, but I'd be careful with it :)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net