SUG: RPM database verification / repair, nightly and in Anaconda

[Tony Nelson]

At 9:43 AM +0200 11/21/06, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>On Tue, 21 Nov 2006, seth vidal wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 17:49 -0600, Steven Pritchard wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 04:38:23AM -0800, Otto Rey wrote:
>>>> This sound good, but first we need to detect why rpms database
>>>> got corrupted.
>>>
>>> It's Berkeley DB.  Corruption should be expected.  :-/
>>>
>>
>> I guess I'm a little confused here, actually.
>>
>> Let's take bsddb out of the example.
>>
>> If I'm a client of an oracle db and I repeatedly open, read, close the
>> database using the interface available, for small amounts of data that
>> might not be the most efficient use of the database connection.
>>
>> However, if as a result of open-read-close the database is corrupted
>> and/or rendered unusable where would you say the bug lies?
>>
>> To me it seems like a valid client connection should not be able to
>> corrupt a database simply by open-read-closing no matter how many times.
>> And if it can then clearly there is something wrong with the database
>> code.
>
>Well, obviously. I think that's exactly what Steven means... Personal
>experience with both subversion repos using Berkeley DB storage and rpmdb
>has made me too expect nothing else but eventual corruption from BDB :-/

It would be a good idea to find out how many Fedora users have corrupt RPM
databases.  My rpm_verifydb package at
<http://georgeanelson.com/rpm-verifydb.htm> is a start, but it won't report
problems back to you guys.  ISTM that if yum were to (possibly temporarily)
verify the RPM database with the only tool available in RPM, "rpm
--verifydb" (or its synonym "rpmdb_verify"), and then report only broken
databases to Fedora, that this would not be the sort of privacy invasion
that is causing so much angst.  If RPM's developer, Jeff Johnson, is
correct, you won't receive any reports, and the issue can be dropped.  See
the thread I started at Redhat's rpm-list, "SUG: Automatic RPM database
verification and repair", for his take on the whole matter.

If you want me to do some of this, ask.
-- 
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TonyN.:'    The Great Writ     <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
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