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

Wed Nov 16 14:48:32 UTC 2011
Akemi Yagi <amyagi at gmail.com>

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Denniston, Todd A CIV
NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane <todd.denniston at navy.mil> wrote:
> I have been seeing something for quite some time which has confused me
> considerably for over a year, perhaps one of you can help me understand.
>
> Assumed: rpm queries are against _a_ database.
> Assumed: database queries against the same database, without changes to
> the data in the database, will return the same data.
>
> Confusion: then why are some of the summaries reported by rpm different?
>
> Each day I (cron.daily) run the following command
> rpm -qa \
>     --qf
> '"%{VENDOR}","%{NAME}","%{VERSION}","%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}","%{ARCH}","%
> {SUMMARY}"\n' \
>  | sort -t\" -k3 > ${OUTFILE}
>
> Stuff the resulting ${OUTFILE} in an rcs file.
>
> And some days the rcs file will show deltas such as the following (which
> was pulled from a rather recent set of flipflops):
>
> --- mach.csv    2011/11/15 10:50:04
> +++ mach.csv    2011/11/15 09:22:53
>
> -"CentOS","bash","3.2","3.2-32.el5","i386","The GNU Bourne Again shell
> (bash) version 3.1."
> +"CentOS","bash","3.2","3.2-32.el5","i386","The GNU Bourne Again shell
> (bash) version 3.2"

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?
uname -mr ?

Have you cleared yum cache? Not just running a 'yum clean all' but
emptying the /var/cache/yum directory ?

Akemi