[Aurora-sparc-devel] something really disturbing going on with rpm

[Magnus]

I installed aurora 2.0 on a couple of boxes today that were meant to 
replace x86/centos and x86/ubuntu boxes.  The aurora boxes are a Netra 
T1 105 and an E250, respectively.

I noticed all kinds of rpm related issues with 2.0.  Some of them I 
learned of through the irc channel, like 'rpm -e rpmdb-redhat' to make 
macro errors go away, and having to install the keys from the web site 
since the distribution does not already have gpg keys, and fixing the 
broken yum repositories.

I found another where after doing a yum update, sshd gets de-registered 
from chkconfig.

But it gets much more disturbing than that.

During the initial installation, I was sure that postfix and ntp got 
installed (as examples).  You can log on and see that all the files are 
there, but things like "rpm -q --whatprovides /usr/sbin/postalias" would 
have rpm proclaim that the file is not owned by any package.  "rpm -q 
postfix" would proclaim postfix is not installed.  But I can see it there!

There are deep serious issues with 2.0 that deserve some more eyes so we 
can figure out what is going on here, and how many others are affected 
(and don't even realize it!)  I know 3.0-beta is right around the 
corner, but 2.0 is being widely used right now.

I'm not even sure what is happening to rpm right now enough to file an 
informed bug report against it, but it is happening on all of my sun 
machines (5 right now) so I don't think this is a PEBKAC.  I encourage 
others to check out their rpm database and make sure it really has 
account of the packages you think are installed.