I just upgrades a huge number of packages downloaded off the Web with "rpm -U *.rpm". I got all kinds of errors from the upgrades. Unfortunately, rpm doesn't tag output from installations with the package which generated the output, so I had a good time playing guessing games and reinstalling the suspicious RPMs one by one until I found the ones that generated the errors. All of the error messages printed by rpm should include the name of the RPM file which caused the error to be generated. Furthermore, any output generated by the scripts run during an RPM installation or uninstallation needs to be tagged in some way by rpm to show which install / uninstall generated the output. I was using rpm-3.0.4-0.48, although I doubt that this problem is fixed in rpm-4.0 (although I believe it should be fixed before the next release).
There only 2 error messages, both pathological, on the dependency resolution and transaction set install that do not identify what package was involved . There are of course other errors. Can you supply details of what errors you are referring to?
Well, for one, see the "execution of script failed" error I got that is described in bug 12449. Besides that, as I noted in my bug report, I am also concerned about all of the output generated by the external scripts called by rpm during an installation, uninstallation or upgrade. These scripts' output needs to be somehow tagged by rpm so that it is clear which package it came from.
Ah, yes. Thanks for the suggestion, fixed in both rpm-3.0.5-0.7/rpm-4.0-0.48. Please reopen this bug if there are other places that better error messages are needed. The messages from installs will be fixed before Red Hat 7.0. It's an obvious and loud problem (and with a more informative error message, it';s now even easier to fix :-)