On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 19:15 +0300, Pasi Pirhonen wrote:

man page

'Use --initdb to create a new database, use --rebuilddb to rebuild the database indices from the installed package headers.' As in --initdb would efectively nuke all your bookkeeping about installed RPMS.

Last time I checked --initdb just creates an empty database. -- rebuilddb creates an empty database and re-populates it. You can run the latter after former. In fact, I typically had to do that back with early RPM 4.0.

Furthermore, RPM 4 can get RPM database info from outside the database. Remember, the db is just an index. The RPM information is stored outside of it too.