Rawhide package problems

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, 2003-10-25 at 14:01, Andre Robatino wrote:
> > > >   The following four packages from this morning were improperly built and
> > > > can't be installed.
> > > 
> >   I noticed that for some reason the four RPM files were all 5896 bytes.  I
> > cleaned out /var/spool/up2date and tried again and this time the files
> > downloaded and installed properly (and were bigger, of course).  I have no
> > idea what happened.
> 
>   I noticed that all four 5896-byte files were identical, and they were all
> the following HTML page, which basically says
> 
> Page Not Found (404)

I had a different problem this morning, which was that the
openoffice.org-libs RPM was not downloaded completely, although up2date
displayed no errors, which says to me that the server simply didn't
provide it in its entirety. There could have been a variety of reasons
for this, none of which are really that important to solving the
problem.

The upshot was that up2date failed in the middle of the upgrade process
with a fatal error, leaving some of my packages erased and some
installed. (As a tester, I know I should have tried to restore to the
pre-error state and run again, but to be honest, I didn't have time due
to domestic responsibilities.) I did go back and check the downloaded
RPM's in /var/spool/up2date, and that was the only one with a problem
(and was not the last one downloaded, either).

It seems to me that up2date should be doing this step, i.e. an "rpm -K"
on the package files  before installing (possibly with a
"--nosignature", since this may affect rawhide at least for right now),
to make sure that the files at least are complete and internally
consistent. Am I missing something here or should I file an RFE?

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE