New rpm version about to hit rawhide

[Kevin Kofler]

Andy Green <andy <at> warmcat.com> writes:
> >> Of the two issues, surely memory use is the worst?

Surely correctness is more important!

> But if the price in memory for solving a multilib issue has to be paid
> for even when a single arch is all there is, that would be more painful
> since already struggling low memory single-arch boxes have to pay it for
> no benefit to them.

There is a benefit. This bug doesn't only affect multilib. Another common case 
where it triggers is failed %postun scriptlets. When you then 
rpm -e --noscripts the old version, suddenly some files are gone.

> I guess those 'many' people aren't installing and updating on low end
> machines from a couple of years ago.

Oh, I am. I have a Pentium II laptop with 160 MB RAM. It was one of the 
machines hit by this bug (failed nfs-utils %postun) and I ended up resorting to 
restoring the missing documentation files manually. (I guess I could also just 
have ignored it, but missing files which are supposed to be installed are bad.) 
So I'd sure appreciate that laptop getting the fix, even if it means more 
memory use.

> >>   I installed F7 on my
> >> in-laws' old laptop with 256MB last week, it did install okay because I
> >> took the precaution of turning everything except the most basic stuff
> >> off (including X), then yumming it in afterwards.

I've already given up on Anaconda on that laptop. I just used apt-rpm to 
upgrade from FC5 to FC6 (which has the advantage of being able to swap out 
whereas Anaconda tends to simply crash when it runs out of memory) and I'm 
planning to the the same for FC6->F7. (It's still running FC6 right now.) The 
FC2->FC5 Anaconda upgrade had to be restarted a couple of times due to Anaconda 
just locking up from lack of memory. Luckily, it did that when computing the 
upgrades from the next ISO (I did a HD install with CD ISOs), not in the middle 
of a transaction. So now I'm unwilling to let Anaconda anywhere near that 
machine, it doesn't have enough RAM. Oh, and to compensate, apt-rpm memory use 
is going to improve a lot with SQLite metadata support which is already in the 
latest development version, so I'm not worried.

        Kevin Kofler