RASH RECOVERY AND RPM There seems to be subtle fault in the presentation of Red Hat that I wish to bring to your attention. I had enormous difficulty upgrading from rh 6.1 to 7.0, caused mainly by the change from RPM 3 to RPM 4. I could not get the rpm system to work because of circular dependencies in the database format. In desperation I deleted RPM 3 and loaded RPM 4 off the CD. To my horror, I found that I had no way of using RPM because it in rpm format, which of course need RPM to unpack it! I resolved the problem by going to rpm.org and downloading RPM 4 in .tgz format, from which I could obtain a working version using gunzip and tar. It struck me that a distribution ought to contain a rescue procedure that does not rely on having a working version of RPM available. I suggest that RPM be provided not just as an RPM but also as a tar package, with tar available on the rescue disk or somewhere else convenient for unpacking. This would allow a 'black start' with the need for a complete re-installation.
All versions of rpm are always available at ftp.rpm.org, in packages that can be unpacked with rpm2cpio, and, for the i386 platforms, in a tar ball. Whether a better job can be done with rescue disks and such is trickier, as there simply isn't a whole lot of room on a floppy disk. FWIW, if you had chosen to use the anaconda installer to upgrade from 6.1 to 7.0, your upgrade path would have been far, far easier. Otherwise, rpm-3.0.5 understands both version 3 and version 4 packages. Circular dependencies, meanwhile, are a distribution problem, not an rpm problem. Yes there are/were big changes beween 6.1 and 7.0