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Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 11:35:07 +0200
From: "Karel J. Bosschaart" <karelj@kayjay.xs4all.nl>
To: ogautherot@freesurf.fr
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cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Broken pkgdb and ruby core dump...
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On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 11:13:40AM +0200, ogautherot@freesurf.fr wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm running FreeBSD 5.2.1 with a number of updates (thanks in advance for
> copying me on answers as I had to unsusbscribe to this list due to high
> traffic).
> 
> After installing a package (I'm updating KDE and GNOME), I suddenly got the
> error message:
> 
> [Updating the pkgdb <format:bdb1_tree> in /var/db/pkg ... - 614 packages
> found (-10 +77) (...)ruby18 in malloc(): error: allocation failed
> Abort (core dumped)
> #
> 
> I can confirm that the core is really dumped :-)
> 
> I get this message upon each (direct or indirect) invocation of pkgdb - the
> number of packages to update varies though...
> 
> Is there a way to fix the database? I seem to have this problem on a regular
> basis and could fix it so far... only by reinstalling the system! I suspect
> there must be a "pkg fsck" somewhere... I can rebuild it by deleteing
> /var/db/pkg and rebuild all the packages manually but I have more fun plans
> than rerunning "make install clean" on 614 packages :-)

I had this problem recently and worked around by moving /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db
to some safe place and then rebuilding it (I think using pkgdb -F). It's not 
as much work as the solutions you mention.

Do you have any idea how your pkgdb ended up this way? In my case it was
almost certainly caused by two simultaneous portupgrade's trying to access
the database. (I don't think that's supported in any way.) 

Karel.