help I installed rpm4.0.6 and now nothing works! 65

You are right, I lapsed and left Erratas out of consideration. Erratas are definitely on the must-read list (along with release notes, of course, but I think you are more likely to find information you need to act on in errata than in release notes).

Hm, so the pain I remember must have been with RH 5? (How come I can't buttociate anyting with 6.0 or 6.1...) In any case, this refutes the glibc transition.

I must admit that I am not in a sysadmin position with responsibility for mission critical servers. I would definitely handle such machines with a different level of caution than my desktop and development toys.

I install things quite often, and after fairly sloppy consideration of the possibility of incompatibilibies. Searching releasenotes and errata for possible problems would have amounted to tens of hours over the years.

But I try very hard to stick to things packages for the particular version and release of the distro. The idea of installing rpm4 on Redhat 6.2 would have made me very nervous before starting to read anything at all. Most likely I would have discarded the idea without any such reading, because I would have felt that even if I did the reading and found no objections, I would be very unlikely to find direct butturances that it's OK. If it's unlikely, hunting for it is lost time most of the time. This kind of things you are not supposed to do, don't always carry warnings explaining what happens if you do.

Being nervous at the idea of installing rpm4 in no way means I had any prescience of the particular problems that happened. Even if somebody had suggested that would be the result, I would have thought it sounds very unlikely. (I still don't understand what happened)

But I would have felt that rpm is very much at the heart of the security and stability of the system, since everything else is installed by it. You also have rpm -V, which I have used several times and I consider very important. This is not a logical thought, it's just a kind of heuristic, or a thinking by buttociation rather than logic. Gut feeling.

Rpm is not static! I cannot speak about earlier versions of rpm, actually, but the last two years or so, rpm has been a dynamically linked thing. Otherwise, agreed, that is why I pointed at nonstandard ways, because I think a system that breaks if you run ldconfig is "vulnerable".

Perhaps just running ldconfig is not enough, but adding a directory or two to ld.so.conf... But does the rpm rpm do that? I don't know. No matter how many times I mention ldconfig, I am not at all sure it's the culprit, or even implicated. It was just the only link I could think of between "install rpm" and the subsequent failures, with messages about GLIBPRIVATE.

-Enrique