From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 Description of problem: When upgrading to latest rpm version, using 'yum upgrade', ... popt 100 % done 6/94 rpm 100 % done 7/94 /bin/chown: `rpm.rpm': invalid user gimp-print 100 % done 8/94 pyxf86config 100 % done 9/94 ... Checking in another window, /etc/passwd and /etc/group both know about rpm now. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.3-0.13 How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. Upgrade to rpm-4.3-0.13 via 'yum upgrade' 2. 3. Actual Results: Saw message: /bin/chown: `rpm.rpm': invalid user Expected Results: No error message Additional info:
Both user/group "rpm" (== 37 iirc) are defined in the system accounts distributed with Red Hat distros, have been for years. Either install that package, or add the "rpm" user/group manually before installing/upgrading rpm. There is a slight chance that your getpwnam and getgrnam are failing with "rpm" as well.
This is a bug reported in devel tree attributed to coreutils. Apparently chown user.group format is not working anymore. Looking at the chown man page what works is chown user:group. If this is a permanent change a number of rpm's need to be updated.