yum commonly segfaults after FC2 -> FC3 upgrade

[Scott Kullberg]

Hello...

A couple of days ago I upgraded from FC2 to FC3 from a set of CDs. Since
then, yum has been segfaulting quite commonly. It's not every time; I
have been able to get the system updated.

After installation I did have to spend a lot of time cleaning out
duplicate RPMs (for instance, foo-1.2.3-12 from FC3 and foo.1.2.2-10
from FC2); I'm not sure if this is because of a crash during an update
or a problem in the installation.

I reinstalled (with --replacepkgs) most of the packages downloaded
during my initial update in order to fix this and other errors reported
by "rpm -Va". I thought it might have to do with prelinking so ran
/etc/cron.daily/prelink, without result. Running "rpm -V" on all the
Python and related RPMs shows them clean. I am using the yum.conf from
fedorafaq.org, though I have the alternate repositories disabled. (My
FC2 installation did not.) I've also tried 'yum clean all' in the hopes
that reloading some corrupted header would help, but that didn't do
anything.

The segfault is from the python process and is most common while it's
reading metadata at the start of the process, but can happen while
downloading or installing packages as well.

The beginning of the stack trace is:
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0067ab4a in PyString_FromStringAndSize ()
   from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#1  0x0067f03f in PyString_FromFormatV () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#2  0x006b4cef in PyErr_Format () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#3  0x006540f7 in PyInstance_New () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#4  0x00675d14 in PyObject_GetAttr () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#5  0x0069ba5f in _PyUnicodeUCS4_IsAlpha () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#6  0x00673901 in PyCFunction_Call () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#7  0x006a651c in _PyEval_SliceIndex () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#8  0x006a797b in _PyEval_SliceIndex () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#9  0x006a809e in PyEval_EvalCodeEx () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#10 0x00663e2e in PyFunction_SetClosure () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#11 0x00650607 in PyObject_Call () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0
#12 0x00657d98 in PyMethod_New () from /usr/lib/libpython2.3.so.1.0


I haven't seen anything else in the list archives on this problem. Is
there anything I can do to fix or diagnose this, or should I just do a
clean FC3 installation if I decide I can't any longer put up with crashy
yum?

Thanks very much!



-- 
Scott E Kullberg  --><--  sekullbe at comcast.net