Bug 865020

See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=624964
Over here yumdb is 125 megabytes.
That costs and takes time when restoring as well. especially all those tiny files.
Blocksize is 4096 so the yumdb wastes quite a lot.

E.g.:

[root@surfplank2 g]# cd 7729f8921cf67a9a5796f0851441ee50ac3ac7bc-gimp-2.8.2-1.fc17-x86_64
[root@surfplank2 7729f8921cf67a9a5796f0851441ee50ac3ac7bc-gimp-2.8.2-1.fc17-x86_64]# ls -al
total 124
drwxr-xr-x.    2 root root  4096 Aug 31 15:24 .
drwxr-xr-x.  642 root root 86016 Oct  4 10:26 ..
-rw-r--r--. 2502 root root     3 Aug 11  2010 changed_by
-rw-r--r--.    1 root root    64 Aug 31 15:24 checksum_data
-rw-r--r--.   16 root root     6 Aug 31 15:24 checksum_type
-rw-r--r--.   16 root root     6 Aug 31 15:24 command_line
-rw-r--r--.  883 root root     7 Jan 14  2011 from_repo
-rw-r--r--.   15 root root    10 Aug 31 15:24 from_repo_revision
-rw-r--r--.   15 root root    10 Aug 31 15:24 from_repo_timestamp
-rw-r--r--. 2250 root root     4 Aug  2  2010 reason
-rw-r--r--. 2335 root root     2 Jul  6 14:48 releasever
[root@surfplank2 7729f8921cf67a9a5796f0851441ee50ac3ac7bc-gimp-2.8.2-1.fc17-x86_64]# du -sk .
40	.

That is 40 KB for 112 bytes of data? Make it 128 for a few nulls here and there.
That is 0.3% efficieny.
And then there is the lack of usability for the info beyond the current Fedora version.
Multiply by the millions of yum users and tadaa! you must have shares in seagate, hitachi, samsung, etc.

This script works for me.  "yum clean yumdb" would be nice, still.
Mine yumdb is about 20MB, something I can live with..

#! /bin/bash
declare -A INS
for pkg in `rpm -qa`; do
  INS[$pkg]=1
done
for path in /var/lib/yum/yumdb/?/*; do
  pkg=${path#*-}
  pkg=${pkg%-*}.${pkg##*-}
  [ -z ${INS[$pkg]} ] && rm -rf $path
done

Zdeněk,

Thanks for the script but this does not solve the problems for the end user.
As I described the user interface should also clean out the yumdb with the `clean all` or at least provide a specific command to do so.
Furthermore the storage method is highly inefficient as I demonstrated.

On top of all that yum still complains when I installed/removed a package using rpm, as if that is abnormal, a sin or worse.
This issue has been discussed before but why must yum have another way or maybe even multiple ways of storing info that links very much to the rpm db.
Why can't yum not have a database like rpm's for all info that is related to rpm but not in the rpm database. That would be a lot more efficient.
All this aside of the actual reason for having a database for yum.

Yum just needs to find all dependencies when installing, removing, etc.
No further information should be stored and a simple log file should suffice.

I think there's a reason why Yum does not provide similar functionality: Removing uninstalled packages from yumdb likely breaks "yum history" commands (this also rules out rpmdb piggybacking as yumdb storage).

There's no doubt the current yumdb implementation is inefficient space-wise.  But (from my POV as a Yum user) this does not matter that much- I'd rather see faster and more reliable MD updating, faster depsolving etc.

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 19 development cycle.
Changing version to '19'.

(As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 19 development
cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 19 End Of Life. Thank you.)

More information and reason for this action is here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora19

This issue persists in Fedora 20. After an upgrade via fedup I see the packages in my yumdb are all from prior releases starting with fc17. I don't see anything from fc20 there. 

I had done "yum clean all" before checking.

If I may be so bold as to jump in here, 
 `find /var/lib/yum/yumdb/ -name "*fc17*" | wc -l`
yields 2932 folders. However, 
 `yumdb search releasever 17`
shows only three packages currently installed.

`rpm -qa | grep fc17` says there are six packages left over from fc17. I checked, there are no more-recent versions for xfce4-doc, faad2 (+dev,libs), tango-icon-scheme or libfreebob.

(I know this isn't the place to start ranting about yum's reverse-dependency-hell. When you remove a package, it should remove only those files that package installed, not something installed by another package. I tried to remove an old perl module, but yum thought it would be a smart idea to delete the entire Xorg, KDE, XFCE, etc. trees, including bash. One file and my entire installation goes away. Fortunately the yes/no prompt came to the rescue.)

This message is a notice that Fedora 19 is now at end of life. Fedora 
has stopped maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 19. It is 
Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no 
longer maintained. Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now this bug will
be closed as EOL if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '19'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora 19 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora, you are encouraged  change the 'version' to a later Fedora 
version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a 
more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes 
bugs or makes them obsolete.

This message is a reminder that Fedora 20 is nearing its end of life.
Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now Fedora will stop maintaining
and issuing updates for Fedora 20. It is Fedora's policy to close all
bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. At that time
this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a Fedora  'version'
of '20'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version.

Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not 
able to fix it before Fedora 20 is end of life. If you would still like 
to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version 
of Fedora, you are encouraged  change the 'version' to a later Fedora 
version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a 
more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes 
bugs or makes them obsolete.

Same here:

$ rpm -q fedora-release
fedora-release-21-2.noarch
$ find /var/lib/yum/yumdb -name \*.fc20-\* | wc -l
2541
$ find /var/lib/yum/yumdb -name \*.fc21-\* | wc -l
781
$ find /var/lib/yum/yumdb -name \*.fc19-\* | wc -l
26

Is there a reason I need previous Fedora release packages in my yumdb?

Yum will delete these entries if yum removes the package. fedup doesn't use yum though.

You can use "yumdb undeleted" to see the old yumdb entries, but as of F22 dnf is now the main packaging software so it makes little sense to wrkaround fedup in yum.

dnf is said to be the new yum.
it is at 1.0.0 and it doesn't even shwo us teh most basic stuff.
So how are we to be convinced that dnf will never do the stuff described in this bug?