Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 11017
Infinite loop in reponse to rpm -qa
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
After installing the Rawhide rpm for rpm-3.1-0.7, I ran into a problem with 'rpm -qa' -- namely it will repeatedly list all the rpms in the database (i.e. it will list everything in the database, and then do it again, and again, ...). An attempt at rebuilding the database failed for similar reasons -- after waiting for some time after starting 'rpm --rebuild' and watching the size of the rebuilt database double the size of the original and continue growing, I interrupted it and performed some queries on the (albeit uncompleted) new database. Queries for specific rpms (via 'rpm -q name') resulted in many copies of the same rpm being reported (this does not happen with the original database).
All versions of RPM after 2.1-0.3 are inherintly screwed up and can lead to permanent database corruption and data loss, I recommend reinstalling the version you were previously using. Installing rpm 3.1-0.9 will result in an inability to access your rpmbd and will core dump constantly so don't try to upgrade to solve the problem, downgrading is the only solution. -Stan Bubrouski
This problem is fixed as of rpm-3.1-0.21 and I strongly recommend you install it, as it finally is able to convert old db formats to new format with rpm --rebuilddb, and it is most stable 3.1 release of rpm I have seen ;) -Stan Bubrouski
These problems have been fixed in the latest rpm-4.0-0.56 packages.