Re: Bad rpmdb, where'd this come from?

[Jeff Johnson <jbj redhat com>]

On Sun, May 26, 2002 at 12:59:02PM -0400, Tom Diehl wrote:
> On Sun, 26 May 2002, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> 
> > Scary message, ain't it?
> 
> Yep!!
> 
> > Short answer:
> > 	Message (and problem) is harmless, ignore.
> 
> Ok, but I am fussy and do not like error messages. :-)

The initial fix in rpm (after investigating) was to remove the fprintf.
I guess that's the type of solution you prefer, no messages, no problem.

:-)

> 
> > Longer answer:
> > 	The last deletion from a hash page did noty mark the page dirty,
> > 	causing the reference count on the page to be one smaller than
> > 	it should be. Later, when a verify is run, the -1 refcount is
> > 	detected, and the condition is reported.
> > 
> > 	There's a Berkeley DB patch to fix, dropped out when upgrading
> > 	to db-4.0.14, reapplied since:
> > 
> > 	* Wed Feb 13 2002 Jeff Johnson <jbj@redhat.com>
> > 	- reapply Berkeley DB patch #4491.
> > 	
> > What's a PITA, is that the condition is persistent in the database store,
> > so, if you've ever used a version of rpm w/o the fix, the message will
> > eventually be displayed, leading to all sorts of confusion about whether
> > the problem is actually fixed or not. (Hint: the problem is fixed).
> 
> So am I understanding you correctly thinking that if I ever used a package
> w/o the fix even upgrading to the latest and greatest rpm package will not
> prevent the error message from displaying at some point??
> 
> If so does --rebuilddb help at all? It would seem to have cleared up the 
> errors for Harry.
> 

Describing persistance is complicated, here's the short and less precise
answer:

Use rpm-4.0.4-7x.18 from now on, do a single --rebuilddb, and you
should never see the problem again.

73 de Jeff

-- 
Jeff Johnson	ARS N3NPQ
jbj@redhat.com (jbj@jbj.org)
Chapel Hill, NC