rpm and gnome

[Michael Grant <mgrant grant org>]

I'm trying to use rpm with the helix gnome rpm database.

I tried compiling rpm-3.0.5 with the BerkleyDB 2.7.7 from
www.sleepycat.com but no joy.  I get the following error message:

# rpm -q -a --dbpath /opt/gnome/lib/rpm
cannot open file //opt/gnome/lib/rpm/nameindex.rpm: Invalid argument
nrpmQuery: rpmdbOpen() failed

After some headaches and some time spent in the debugger, apparently
libdb 2.7.7 doesn't support the correct version of the hash indexes in
/opt/gnome/lib/rpm/packages.rpm which was created by the helix
installer.
libdb supports versions 4 and 5 but this file seems to be version 6
according to the error message I landed on when tracing through libdb.

For those interested, I ended up at db-2.7.7/db/db.c:443 in the libdb
2.7.7 source code which logs "unsupported hash version number".

I then tried to compile rpm against libdb 3.0.55, but the old 1.85
interface is no longer supported in that version.

Any suggestions?