RPM broken

[James Olin Oden]

On Sat, 3 Apr 2004, Martin Alderson wrote:

> I installed fedora core 2 test 2 this morning, and some tool locked up 
> while using RPM. Now RPM has died - I type any command in and it just 
> sits there with no output.
> 
> I seem to remembering having to clear a cache or lock file, or maybe 
> even rebuilding the RPM database.
> 
> Any suggestsions?
>
First off, get the output from the back trace.  To do this find rpm's 
pid, and then run:

	gdb -p $pid
	bt	# This is in gdb

Send that output to the list.  There are two case of lockups that I know
of.  One, the program using librpm was kill with a -9 or it exited before 
closing the rpmdb.   This one is pretty common, and the back trace will 
show if this is the case.  This lockup is not a bug in rpm, and is fixed
by removing the files:

	/var/lib/rpm/__db*

The second one, I have only seen the CVS head, but it coudl be elsewhere, 
is when rpm hangs while waiting for a scriptlet to exit.  This one is 
very intermittent (almost rare, but if you do enough transactions your 
guaranteed to see it depending on your hardware).   Again, if I see
the back trace I can almost certainly discern that that is what is going 
on.  I wrote a bugzilla report on this, and a reasonable attempt was made 
to fix it, but I am still seeing on my test mule.

Cheers...james
 > 
> Martin Alderson,
> IntechHosting
> 
> Email: martin at intechhosting.co.uk
> Web: http://www.intechhosting.co.uk
> 
> 
>