I've been having problems installing rpm packages for several months, finally, someone recognized the symptoms and told me the problem.  Now I need to know how to fix it.

The original symptoms:
rpm gives this error message with some packages
"only packages with major numbers <=3 are supported by this version of RPM"

NOTE: this is not the usual dependency problem, the RPM program itself,
fails to open "Guppi-0.35.2-1.i586.rpm", even for query!

I've been told that this is because rpm-4.0 generated package files that are incompatible with, and can't be read by rpm-3.0

Some other packages won't install because of these dependencies:
   rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix)  <= 4.0-1
   rpmlib(CompressedFileNames)  <= 3.0.4-1

First of all, searches for: "rpmlib", "PayloadFilesHavePrefix", "CompressedFileNames", on rpmfind.net and www.linux-mandrake.com found nothing.

I did a search for string "PayloadFilesHavePrefix" and
"CompressedFileNames" on my machine from /usr, both were found in:
/usr/bin/rmp2cpio
/usr/lib/librpm.so.0
/usr/lib/librpm.so.0.0.0
/usr/lib/librpm.a
/usr/lib/librpm.so

So, I suspect that this dependency error message is WRONG, and "rpmlib" should really be "librpm".

At the time, I had rpm-3.0.5-27mdk.i586.rpm, so I down graded to rpm-3.0.3-43mdk.i586.rpm (from my Mandrake 7.0 install CDROM)

With this older than 3.0.4-1 version o rpm. I still get these same dependencies messages:
   rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix)  <= 4.0-1
   rpmlib(CompressedFileNames)  <= 3.0.4-1

So, I also suspect that the "<= 4.0-1" and "<= 3.0.4-1" are incorrect too, and should be ">=".

Of course, rpm-4.0-8mdk.rpm has these same dependencies:
   rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix)  <= 4.0-1
   rpmlib(CompressedFileNames)  <= 3.0.4-1
   glibc >= 2.1.92

So, it seems that rpm-4.0 has dependencies of itself!  But doesn't recognize that it is itself because of error in the dependency list.

I downloaded glibc-2.2.1-3mdk.i586.rpm, but I can not install this because the package was built with rpm-4.0, which I don't have.

One final gotcha:  There seems to be no way to determine what version of rpm was used to build a particular package, without downloading it and trying to install it.  I could download packages for months before I find the right one! (and I have been, but I haven't found it yet!)

Questions:

1.  Is there a rpm package distributor that identifies which version of rpm was used to build the packages?  Who?

2.  How is one supposed to upgrade from rpm-3.0 to rpm-4.0?

3.  It there a version of rpm-3.0.x that can read packages built by rpm-4.0?
 
 

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