$ rpm -U package-1.0-1.i386.rpm failed to stat /mnt/h: Input/output error Segmentation fault $ Yes, /mnt/h is mentioned in /etc/mtab and it is supposed to carry smb mount FS. Unfortunately, something is wrong there and the mounting breaks every now and then - so I have to remount. What I don't understand is why this should matter to RPM.
what version of rpm? I believe it's looking at mounted filesystems to attempt to determine if there's enough space for the package to fit.
$ rpm -q rpm rpm-2.92-13 if all the files in the package are destined to /etc and /usr, rpm has no business looking at /mnt
Not true. There is no way for rpm to know whether symlinks point to other mounted file systems even though all paths in the package start with /etc or /usr. For efficiency, all mounted file systems are processed at the same time to ascertain available disk space.
I hardly would think that the efficiency gained during an installation (a reletively one time process) is worth making rpm unusable if a mount point goes bad (maybe remote server goes down, etc.), especially since checking this with a slow remote server could in fact slow down the rpm process much longer than would be had with a better check. Efficiency here should be "least checks to remote locations" instead of "least number of seconds under ideal conditions". Might be there is something I am missing though (like the symlink check would take a LONG period of time to complete, long enough to make it frustrating to perform).
The available disk space of all mounted files systems is acquired before looping over all files to be installed/uninstalled and calculating the disk space needed/released by each package. The efficiency comes from the implementation in rpm (which is used every time that a package is installed or removed), not from the install process. In fact, rpm queries the mounted file systems only once (this was the original problem). Attempting to deal with every possible cicumstance (e.g. mount point going bas during an install) is not worth the rpm coding effort required.