I performed a rather minimalist custom GUI install of beta3. This machine has a rather small disk. When I try running rpm in console mode, if run as root rpm just makes the current user log out. If I use su to become root and then run rpm, I instantly become my normal user again. If I log in from the console as root and then run rpm, I end up at the login prompt again. This is true for all kinds of ways to invoke rpm, including upgrading with rpm -Uvh and even rpm --help. When I check later, rpm has spit out a core file in the directory. When I run rpm as a normal user, rpm just takes forever to run. Doing a rpm -qa results in minutes of waiting with no activity at all (not even a harddrive spinning) but 80 - 99 % CPU usage, and then all of the sudden the output comes. Unfortunately, I haven't got gdb installed on the system, and the rpm behavior makes it kind of hard to install it...
Created attachment 1127 [details] strace of rpm --help
I might as well provide some additional info about the system: CPU: Pentium 233 MMX Memory: 96 MB Disks: 600 MB IDE (/ 436 MB, swap 64 MB) 100 MB IDE Cdrom: 24x Video: Matrox Mystique NIC: Intel Etherexpress 100+ Mouse: Regular two-button PS/2 It might be some sort of clue that most programs on the system when invoked take a very long time and use 99% CPU, like for example mv when moving a strace file onto a floppy disk...
Created attachment 1129 [details] the output of dmesg
export LANG=C (and thus LC_ALL=C) solved all problems. msw and jbj gave that solution.
This defect is considered MUST-FIX for Winston Beta-5
Does rpm-4.0-0.56 fix your problem? Otherwise, I do not know how to reproduce this problem.
Where can I get that version? Could it be put somewhere on the beta ftp site?
Tested with rpm-4.0-0.56 on the same beta3 system (I upgraded the rpm and the rpm-python packages, as it was those two packages that was installed). Now, with LANG=sv, "rpm --help" just outputs RPM version 4.0 Copyright (C) 1998 - Red Hat Software and after those two lines nothing happens for 7 minutes (timed with stopwatch), then suddenly the memory usage peaks until there is hardly free main memory left in the machine and there is some slow output of --help lines, getting written slooowly, and after about 8 minutes "rpm --help" finishes correctly, and all memory is released properly. At peak, about 94 MB of the machines 96 MB of main memory was used (watched top during the run). I don't think that I'll add that there still seems to be something wrong. Simple tasks like like "rpm --version" work like a charm though. I'll add a strace when that rpm run finishes.
I might add that I still use the original glibc from beta3. I will test this issue in beta4 when my beta4 download finishes.
Upgrading to glibc-2.1.91-16 solved the problems. rpm now runs just fine. I found another issue though... rpm doesn't display swedish characters in its output, but replaces them with question marks... Should I file this in another bug?
Thanks for the verification. Could you please file a different bug report for the Swedish characters problem, as this bug # has found it's way onto various MUST-FIX lists? Thanks ...