Why there is a .rpmdb directory in my system?

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Anandawardhana
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Joined: 09/18/2012

While creating backups I happened to notice this directory called .rpmdb (with files in it). Is this normal? What does this directory do?

lembas
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Joined: 05/13/2010

I seem to have one as well. Looks like a similar folder is related to the rpm package manager. I don't know what that's doing on a system that eats deb packages. Unless we both have ran alien, which converts rpms to debs, I might've.

Anandawardhana
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Joined: 09/18/2012

I never ran Alien. Never had RPMs in this machine. This is very strange. I see people complaining about it on Ubuntu sites too. I hope there's nothing to be alarmed....

lembas
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Joined: 05/13/2010

If you have a live Trisquel media at hand, you could try booting it to see if it already has the folder.

Anandawardhana
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Joined: 09/18/2012

Ok, I am now installing it in a VM. Let's see if it's there.

Anandawardhana
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Joined: 09/18/2012

I checked both live image and an updated installation on a VM:

.rpmdb directory is not there.

Also found this bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/rpm/+bug/1069350/

Comment #13 says:
"Ok, confirmed here that dkms does call rpm if it is installed and can create an empty rpm database in / or /root as a side-effect of installing or removing kernel drivers managed with dkms."