[CentOS] Yum segmentation fault updating from 5.6 to 5.7

Thu Sep 15 16:16:47 UTC 2011
sebastiano at datafaber.net <sebastiano at datafaber.net>

On Thu, 15 Sep 2011 08:42:42 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> might be hard to run package-cleanup without having base enabled but
> I would certainly recommend that you run 'rpm -Va [--nofiles
> --nodigest]' to identify the broken dependencies - apparently
> something that the base repository really believes should be there no
> matter what.

I get no output at all from this command, perhaps I have misunderstood 
the flags?

[root at picard ~]# rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest
[root at picard ~]#

In the meantime I have found an interesting data point:

[root at picard ~]# yum clean all
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Cleaning up Everything
Cleaning up list of fastest mirrors
[root at picard ~]# yum update
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Determining fastest mirrors
  * base: mirror.ash.fastserv.com
  * extras: mirror.net.cen.ct.gov
  * updates: mirror.7x24web.net
base                                         | 1.1 kB     00:00
base/primary                                 | 961 kB     00:00
Segmentation fault
[root at picard ~]# ll /var/cache/yum/base
total 1004K
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Sep 15 19:12 cachecookie
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1017 Sep 15 19:11 mirrorlist.txt
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jul 10 12:19 packages/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 961K Sep  5 13:52 primary.xml.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  20K Sep 15 19:12 primary.xml.gz.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.2K Sep  5 13:52 repomd.xml

The file /var/cache/yum/base/primary.xml.gz.sqlite is only 20KB, 
whereas in the "normal" case I'd expect it to be 6.5MB. Somehow, yum is 
failing to regenerate this file for the base repository, and is crashing 
with a segmentation fault when trying to read it. I don't know however 
how to make it generate a correct sqlite file.