On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 03:17:42PM +0000, Tom Hughes via devel wrote:
At this point somebody will no doubt argue that /usr changes on a
package update and that the RPM database is a static definition of
the currently installed OS files, but evidence says otherwise:
% ls -l /var/lib/rpm
total 378M
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 378M Dec 28 16:08 rpmdb.sqlite
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 32K Dec 29 09:27 rpmdb.sqlite-shm
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Dec 28 16:08 rpmdb.sqlite-wal
While "Dec 28 16:08" is indeed the last time I updated that machine
it seems one of the files has changed more recently - no idea what
triggered that but clearly the files are not static between updates.
That is a sqlite write-ahead log shared memory file used to coordinate
access between concurrent clients. Someone who knows more about the depths
of DNF and RPM than me will need to comment, but it looks like `dnf list`
touches it -- even though `rpm -qa` doesn't.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader