Loss of accounts with f11 update

[Panu Matilainen]

On Mon, 6 Apr 2009, John Summerfield wrote:

> shmuel siegel wrote:
>> Panu Matilainen wrote:
>>> There was a bug (just fixed this morning) in rpm which makes 
>>> yum-complete-transaction do nasty things.
>> Nasty is not a strong enough word. I'm certainly glad that this happened to 
>> rawhide users and not release users. This kind of bug could ruin Fedora's 
>> name for a long time.
>> 
>
> If the problem is connected with the change of checksumming method, someone's 
> reputation should be harmed.

It's not related to the checksumming at all, much of the commentary in the 
bug is just wild guessing and handwaving. It's was a bug introduced (by 
yours truly) in the memory+performance optimization work, one that rpm's 
test-suite didn't unfortunately catch at the time when introduced. I'm 
writing new test-cases right now so it wont happen again.

> It's pretty obvious that rpm has to checksum using the old method for a long 
> time to come- as long as upgrading from the oldest supported EL (and maybe 
> oldest-1) to the latest is supported.

The new rpm understands old md5 checksums just fine, it's only the upgrade 
where the hash algorithm changes where the semantics of "regular" %config 
files (ones without noreplace qualifier) cannot be guaranteed. The worst 
that will happen is that you end up with an .rpmsave file when one wasn't 
really needed. %config(noreplace) files aren't affected by the digest 
changes in any way.

> I'm with Lennart, I would have been extremely annoyed, and J's attitude would 
> simply have made me more so.

Sure bugs are annoying, but they're also unfortunately unavoidable - 
humans make mistakes. The best protection against them is having more and 
more of automated tests. Rpm 4.7.x is the first version to actually *have* 
a meaningful build-time test suite, but it's far from "complete", rpm is a 
rather complex piece of work.

Oh and if by 'J' you mean who I think you do, he's not involved in rpm.org 
development, despite making assorted noises in bugzilla.

 	- Panu -