On Wednesday 2021-10-20 17:26, Christian Goll wrote:
Hello, tools like singularity (https://github.com/hpcng/github) can be used to create containers of older distributions, like sle12 or centos-7. With tumbleweed this is not possible any more, as the rpm binary from tumbleweed can't create a rpmdb in bdb format and the rpm binaries from sle12 or centos-7 can't open a rpmdb with the ndb format created during the bootstrap process. Also backporting the rpmdb from ndb to bdb seems to be impossible as the dump formats for the databases differ. A solution to this problem could be to to have an additional rpm_bdb binary in tumbleweed, which only is used for bootstrapping older linux distros. Is this sensible?
Not so much. To bootstrap old distros, one can (and perhaps should) just unpack the old rpms (specifically rpm.rpm & glibc etc.), then use that in a chroot to initialize the rpmdb. 'lo and behold, I did that not too long ago (an attempt was made). https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/issues/1762