From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98; hahaha-fooled you! This is really Mozilla/5.0 on Linux i686 rv:1.0.1 Gecko/2002103) Description of problem: If you attempt to erase a non-existent package rpm exits with an error message but leaves database in inconsistent state. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. rpm -e kde-i18n-German 2. rpm -e kde-i18n-xxxxxx 3. rpm -e kde-i18n-Slovenian Actual Results: 1. Success 2. error: package kde-i18n-xxxxxx is not installed 3. rpm hangs up forever - you can only stop the process with kill -9 because it has interrupts disabled. Expected Results: 1. Success 2. error: package kde-i18n-xxxxxx is not installed 3. Success Additional info: rpm should be much more robust because it is so important to the maintenance of a system, and because it is a RedHat product. An instance of rpm should also behave differently if it sees that the database appears to be locked - instead of just hanging indefinitely with all signals disabled!
You have a stale lock. This has nothing to do with removal of non-existent packages. Remove the stale lock by doing rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db* See the bug report regarding "hangs" and "READ ME FIRST".
Before I started I did: rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__* rpm --initdb rpm --rebuilddb So it was a clean database.
I tried exactly the commands you gave with rpm-4.2-0.56 and cannot reproduce.