[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] rpm --rebuilddb depends on the optional buildtime tag and breaks if a package without it is present (Issue #2527)

[Panu Matilainen]

That buildtime sanity check in rebuilddb is an interesting find. I've seen it there of course but never paid much attention. It goes back all the way to this commit from 1997: be0b90359bcd8156385178eb9b570c0538c0333f. And as is typical for that era, there's not a whole lot of rationale provided.be0b90359bcd8156385178eb9b570c0538c0333f

That check also predates the LSB by years, LSB which I see lists the tag as "informational", as in "optional *and* informative-only". Which doesn't really match with rpm reality, there are multiple tags that are expected to always be present even though they are not used for any actual processing. Other examples of such tags include RPMTAG_BUILDHOST, RPMTAG_SOURCERPM and RPMTAG_RPMVERSION, just to name a few.

Our own tags documentation doesn't really classify mandatory/optional currently, in part because it's such muddy waters. For v4 we can only really document the defacto, going forward we need to do better with v6.

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