rpm --redhat-requires, rpm --redhat-provides

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at welho.com
Thu Sep 9 05:53:51 UTC 2004


On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, seth vidal wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>  I don't want a flamewar, just opinions.
> 
> Are there a lot of people who use the two commands listed in the subject
> very often? I ask b/c there has been some discussion of minimizing the
> number of copies of the package metadata from the installation.

Often? No. Occasionally yes, although that tends to be on either a)  
ancient b) standalone boxes. Because of the static nature of rpmdb-redhat
it grows more useless over time especially on distro like FC where
packages get renamed during the release lifetime and updates are fast and
furious. What I would miss probably is the formatting capabilities of rpm
--qf which makes it useful from scripts for certain things.


> comps.rpm and rpmdb-fedora take up considerable space and now would be a
> good time to discuss removing them for FC4.

comps.rpm has the same problem of being a static entity and a rather 
strange beast at that. I wouldn't miss it a single day as long as the 
equivalent of comps.xml is somewhere around.. but the information is more 
important for systems without network connectivity (or if you just 
happen to *love* shuffling CD's back and forth to install stuff)

> 
> if yum or some other command line tool were to be able to return the
> same data from the xml metadata, instead of the comps or rpmdb-fedora,
> would people be willing to use those?

Oh absolutely, if the command line tool can grok rpm's --queryformat 
syntax or equivalent alternative (but compatibility with rpm would be 
quite important I think so rpm --qf junkies like me don't have to relearn 
a new query "language" :)

	- Panu -





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