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A frequent mistake I make, and have seen many others make, is to run rpm as a non root user when doing installs. Previously the error message was a unhelp "unable to open rpm database". Now the error message is a long discourse about the possible need to upgrade my rpm database. It would be nice if RPM did a simple check to see if the user was not uid 0 and prior to giving database migration instructions simply suggested I become root first. I'm willing to provide a patch if this would accelerated getting this feature implemented.
FWIW, the "long discourse" is all that prevents disaster when upgrading from rpm-3.0.x to rpm-4.0. If you want to attempt a patch, see dbiOpen() in lib/rpmdb.c. I'll be happy to consider changes, but, I warn you ahead of time, the change is much trickier than it looks. Please reopen this bug if you succeed with a patch. Meanwhile, since the "long discourse" is necessary and not otherwise harmful, I'm gonna close this report.