Notes from the leading edge
The gnome-terminal package picked up some interesting behavior where it seemingly grows without bound - a 350MB virtual address space on your editor's system, with 76MB resident. It easily outweighs lean-and-mean applications like emacs and liferea - though it remains outclassed by firefox. The cursor does not respond to focus events; your editor has learned to type at terminals even if they look like they are not listening. Occasionally a terminal will get into a mode where it refuses to respond to input until it receives a mouse click or two. And, occasionally, the whole thing just crashes, taking down every terminal window and every associated ssh session.
Your editor's longstanding appreciation for xterm is on the rise again.
In the hope of picking up a fix in a timely manner, your editor has been tracking the Rawhide repository a bit more closely than usual. Or, at least, attempting to do so. It can be quite discouraging to type "yum update" and have yum simply go off forever. Among other things, one must wait a great long time to distinguish this behavior from yum's normal mode of operation. Other times, it comes back very quickly with a message saying, for all practical purposes, "RPM crashed, you lose, sorry."
That is the sort of message that can chill a system administrator's blood. There's no end of system problems which can be addressed by reinstalling a package, perhaps moving to an older version. That is especially true for systems which are following a leading-edge development repository; one simply expects to install an ill-fated package occasionally. But if the package management system itself fails, this important tool goes away and one's ability to restore a sick system is severely compromised. It's about at this point that one begins to think it would have been good to check the system's backups a little more frequently.
Some digging around turns up the fact that these problems are well known and well documented in the bug-tracking system. Also found was a magic command, previously unknown to your editor, which evidently needs to be part of every system administrator's toolkit (at least, those who work with RPM-based systems):
rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*
Sure enough, every time your editor's system goes nonlinear (i.e. after every "yum update"), removing those cache files makes the problem go away. It would be awfully nice if RPM could figure out for itself that its cache is corrupt and not depend on people to clean up its messes for it. But that, evidently, is more than we should feel entitled to expect.
Still, one could consider taking this issue - perhaps with a patch - to the
RPM maintainer. Except that, for the purposes of most distributions, there
still is no RPM maintainer. Your editor asked who maintains RPM? back in
August, but no distributor has since announced a plan for moving to the
current "upstream" version of RPM or establishing a formal fork. The
November 20 Fedora Board
meeting talked about an upcoming "RPM
announcement," but it remains unannounced as of this writing. Getting a
handle on the status of that crucial package would be most beneficial for
users of RPM-based distributions, whether or not they do silly things like
track development repositories.