RPM Database broken

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, Sam Varshavchik wrote:

> Matthew Saltzman writes:
>
>>> Yes what among those five files is the good one ? Do they include the same
>>> files listing ?? Do I have to copy/ paste them to form a single huge file 
>>> ?
>> 
>> A dump of the RPM db is done nightly, overwriting /var/log/rmppkgs.  The
>
> Ha.

Sorry, I misspoke.  /var/log/rpmpkgs dumps names, versions, architectures. 
These would be the filenames if the filenames followed RH conventions for 
naming RPMs.  They won't correctly dump the name of the RealPlayer RPM 
file, e.g.

>
> Several years ago I suggested making regular backup copies of the entire RPM 
> database, due to persistent corruption caused by the db back-end.  I always 
> considered db, in all of its permutations, to be flaky and unreliable.
>
> jbj vetoed the idea.  That whole episode should be somewhere in Bugzilla.
>
> So now, we're dumping just the names of packages.  Well, at least it's 
> progress, I suppose.  Maybe, in another couple of years, common sense will 
> prevail, and the entire RPM database will get backed up regularly, 
> automatically.
>
> Disk space is cheap, and rpmdb is absolutely vital.  You lose it, you're 
> boned.  Since recovering from this kind of a fsckup would be so trivial, if 
> rpmdb got backed up regularly, there's really no valid excuse not to do it.

I suppose the best place to bring this back up woud be either Bugzilla or 
fedora-devel-list.

But I am inspired to add /var/lib/rpm/ to my backup directories...

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs