Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 34536
Installer can't read installed RPM database on upgrade
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:32:31 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-0.1.28enterprise i686) I have one Red Hat 5.2 server that I want to upgrade to 6.2 to bring it in line with all of our other servers. I tried both the original bootnet.img and the bootnet-20000407.img and both give me the same error. I boot the machine from floppy, make some choices and select "Upgrade existing installation". The installer attempts to determine what RPMs are installed and this causes a crash, the last line being: line 730, in upgradeFindPackages packages =rpm.findUpgradeSet (self.hdList.hdlist, self.initPath) rpm.error: error during upgrade check) The 5.2 machine has all the latest upgrades installed and I suspect that this problem comes from the 4.0.2 rpm upgrade and subsequent RPM database rebuild (in otherwords, I doubt the 6.X installer knows about the new database format). This is problematic because that means that any 5.2, 6.0, or 6.1 machine can't be upgraded to 6.2 until the 6.2 installer can recognize db3 databases. Taking the machine to 7.0 or 7.1, when its released, isn't an option, since I normally don't upgrade until the X.2 releases. Any suggestions (or have I misdiagnosed the problem?) Thanks, Kevin Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot from bootnet.img floppy 2.Select Upgrade existing installation 3. Actual Results: Crash Expected Results: Installer should obtain list of installed RPMS and continue
Matt is there a workaround for this problem?
run rpm --rebuilddb on your system and try again.
How is rebuilding a RPM 4.X, db3 database going to help in installing a version of RedHat that is based on RPM 3.X, db1? You need to 1) update the Red Hat 6.X series of installers to be RPM 4.X aware or 2) provide a means to downgrade RPM and db versions (from 4.X to 3.X and db3 to db1 respectively) so that that the 6.X installers will work or 3) require all upgrades be to 7.1 (or maybe 7.0 if that supports RPM 4.X and db3). I'm not sure what the solution is - so far it appears to be #3, based on the _looooooong_ time its taken you to respond to this bug posting. If this is a planned and forced obselescence of the 5.X series, thats fine - just let it be publicly known before you make changes that orphan a particular distro version so we can plan our upgrade paths appropriately.
the installer knows about all RPM database formats. It just needs to be consistent before the upgrade process begins.
The installer is compatible with previous versions of Red Hat Linux (back to 3.0.3, but not earlier than that). Did you try msw's recommendations and did you have any luck with them?
Closing due to inactivity. Please reopen if you have more information.
Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner on this; I was on vacation. The system in question did have the rpmdb rebuilt immediately after I upgraded to RPM 4.X months ago. As this machine was recently retired and as it was my only remaining Red Hat 5.2 machine, I don't really have anything to test against and am not interested enough to install 5.2 just to resolve this. Thanks for the suggestions and keep up the good work.