[CentOS] How can rpm "%{SUMMARY}" not be consistent?

[Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf Of Akemi Yagi
> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2011 11:20
> To: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] How can rpm "%{SUMMARY}" not be consistent?
> 
> On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 6:56 AM, John Hodrien
<J.H.Hodrien at leeds.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> > On Wed, 16 Nov 2011, Akemi Yagi wrote:
> >
> >> What you are seeing is indeed odd. I see 'version 3.1' but not
'3.2'
> >> anywhere on the Summary line of bash. What is your kernel by the
way?

I would have said you also seeing 'version 3.1.' is one of the very odd
things, but then I check the bash rpm in a repo and it has 'version
3.1.' in the 3.2-32.el5 rpm.

> >> uname -mr ?
> >>
> >> Have you cleared yum cache? Not just running a 'yum clean all' but
> >> emptying the /var/cache/yum directory ?
> >
> > Why would yum cache have any bearing on what rpm reported?
> 
> In my attempts to reproduce what you are seeing, I used 'yum info' a

It takes days/weeks of collecting the data via cron.daily and (I think)
having a few updates/installs happen between some of the runs.
On the boxes where I see it more, I often run the data collection script
immediately following updates.  I almost think there is some kind of rpm
housekeeping that gets done on a daily basis that could affect it, but I
can't figure out what it would be, because the rpm script in cron.daily
only dumps data (similar to what mine dumps) to /var/log/rpmpkgs... it
does not issue any rpm clean up commands. as I understand anacron, each
of the scripts should finish before anacron starts the next, so there
should not be any DB contention, between the rpm script and mine, I
would think.

At one time (in the mists of history, probably around RHEL 1|2) I
thought there was a daily rpm cleanup task, but I can't find it on Cent
5 systems.

> few times for the packages that were not on my systems. But in your
> case (pure rpm operations) yum cache will not be relevant. 

That is my thought too.
But I don't know where rpm could be getting the different info.

> By the way
> I looked at both CentOS 5 and 6 but did not see any inconsistency. 

I am on CentOS 5.

> And
> the reason why I asked about the kernel version was because it was not
> clear which version/release of CentOS you are running. Sorry for the
> noise. I will shut up now.
>