Jeff,

On Monday, 8. June 2009 21:00:16 Jeff Johnson wrote:
> On Jun 8, 2009, at 2:39 PM, Thomas Jarosch wrote:
> > I haven't tried it yet as I remember there was some threading related
> > berkley db trouble when Redhat 7.x was released with rpm 4.0.x,
> > though I'm blurry on the details. So I'll try to get convertdb1
> > running with the latest version that included it.
>
> While your memory may be long, all known "threading"
> issues have long since been "fixed" in RPM.

Nice.

> But these are hysterical factoids, Berkeley DB (and signature/digest
> checking)
> have long since been implemented in RPM, known good, all that remains is
> to assist helping laggards (like you ;-) in upgrading. I don't mean to
> offend
> at all, its a duty and obligation for me.
>
> Holler if you need help building rpm-4.0.4 in your environment. I know
> all the issues if you tell me what problems you see.

I managed to convert the rpm 3.x database using convertdb1. It worked both
with rpm 4.4.2 and even with 4.7.0 from Fedora 11. I cross-checked
various database dumps and they looked very sane.

If someone else tries this stunt: I was getting strange error messages like 
"read only database cursor" during the update, adding the "private" keyword
to this line in /usr/lib/rpm/macros solved it:

%__dbi_cdb      create cdb mpool mp_mmapsize=16Mb mp_size=1Mb private

Thanks again for your help,
Thomas