[LUNI] Why RPM instead of tar.gz

[Michael J McGonagle]

Hello all,

I have been using Mandrake 8.0 now for the past 4-5 months, and in all
that time I have tried to install various *.rpm file. EVERY time that I
have run rpm it complains that my database is in the wrong format and
that I need to run 'rpm --rebuilddb' as root.

I have done this now about 3 times. It still complains about not have
the right format of database for rpm.

I can't image that I am the only one having this sort of problem, but it
makes no sense that I have a clean install of Mandrake 8.0 and I can
install anything with rpm. *.tar.gz files work beautifully. Anytime that
I have a choice between *.tar.gz or *.rpm, I choose *.tar.gz everytime.

Can anyone point me to a solution? Is rpm directly supported by Redhat?
Or because it is a Mandrake install, is this something unique to
Mandrake???

Thanks for the help,

Mike