Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 53548
rpm --queryformat hangs
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:00 EDT
Description of Problem: Not sure if this is the same as eg. #50992 - but as that bug was fixed in rpm-4.0.3-0.87 this should be different: When doing rpm queries, rpm hangs. You have to stop it and remove /var/lib/rpm/__db* , then everything works fine again. There doesn't seem to be an obvious reason why something breaks. Eg. I did a rpm -qa --querytags .... Worked fine. I played around a bit to include all the tags needed, and suddenly rpm stopped working. I also experienced cases where rpm -qa still worked, but rpm -qa --querytags didn't. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.0.3-1.01 How Reproducible: Hm, I think that's just playing around and waiting until it breaks ... nothing more specific ... :( Actual Results: rpm hangs Expected Results: rpm should not hang ... :)
Yup, if you dink around enough, particularly if you use ^C a lot, you will find yourself with an invalid cache (i.e. the /var/lib/rpm/__db* files). The answer for rpm-4.0.3 is basically Don't do that. and, if you ignore that message, then do rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db* when the problem reoccurs. Yes, rpm-4.0.3 removes those files when starting, but that doesn't work if, say, you've ^C'd out of a root install, and are running an rpm query w/o root privileges. The solution is going to be to make rpm setgid rpm, but there's more release engineering needed in order to achieve this.