SOLVED.
While uddating a package i accidentally put a "¸" in the package version in the spec file. And createrepo doesn't like this.

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Janez Kosmrlj <postnalista@googlemail.com> wrote:
I run a local repo for our company's packages. Since yesterday we have problems with creating the repo files. When i run "createrepo --update -s sha rpmdir" i get the folowing error:

File "/usr/share/createrepo/genpkgmetadata.py", line 249, in ?
    main(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/usr/share/createrepo/genpkgmetadata.py", line 223, in main
    mdgen.doPkgMetadata()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/createrepo/__init__.py", line 368, in doPkgMetadata
    self.writeMetadataDocs(packages)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/createrepo/__init__.py", line 532, in writeMetadataDocs
    self.primaryfile.write(po.xml_dump_primary_metadata())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 1032, in xml_dump_primary_metadata
    msg += misc.to_unicode(self._dump_base_items())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/packages.py", line 866, in _dump_base_items
    msg = """
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 83: ordinal not in range(128)


I didn't change anything on the server and it fails on packages that are more than a year old. It usually fails on package number 200-206. When i move the supposedly broken package to a new directory and run createrepo on that directory, then createrepo finishes OK.

I googled a bit, but i couldn't find anything useful. Has anyone on this list seen something similar and what was the problem.

thanx in advance
Janez