two surprises updating my Red Hat Linux 8 system

["D. Hugh Redelmeier" <hugh mimosa com>]

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Whenever I type
	rpm -Fv i386/glibc-common-2.3.2-4.80.6.i386.rpm
I get
	Preparing packages for installation...
	glibc-common-2.3.2-4.80.6

I expect that the -F (freshen) will only install packages that are
newer than the already installed ones.  So after the first insallation
of this version of this package, I expect rpm -F to bypass installing
this one.  But it does not.  This only happens for glibc -- other
packages behave as expected.  Why?
[I just found out something interesting: after rpm --rebuilddb, this 
behaves as expected.  Scary.  It sure would be nice if a corrupt db
were detected rather than just causing mysterious behaviour.]


For other updates I am installing at this time, I get scary messages
like:
	warning: /usr/share/config/colors/Royal created as /usr/share/config/colors/Royal.rpmnew
But these two files appear to be identical:
    # ls -l /usr/share/config/colors/Royal /usr/share/config/colors/Royal.rpmnew 
    -rw-r--r--    1 root     root         3121 Jan 19  2000 /usr/share/config/colors/Royal
    -rw-r--r--    1 root     root         3121 Jan 19  2000 /usr/share/config/colors/Royal.rpmnew
    # cmp /usr/share/config/colors/Royal /usr/share/config/colors/Royal.rpmnew
    # 
It seems to me that this behaviour should be suppressed when the files
are identical.  [Could this be due to a corrupt db?]


I'm using the RPM version that came with RHL8.0: rpm-4.1-1.06.
Buggy, but Red Hat has not issued an update.

Hugh Redelmeier
hugh@mimosa.com  voice: +1 416 482-8253



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