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

seth vidal skvidal at phy.duke.edu
Thu Sep 9 06:04:13 UTC 2004


> 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.

I think all that functionality is housed in popt, but yah - I agree it
is handy.


> 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)

What are these "systems without network connectivity" that you speak
of? :) Actually, there was also some discussion this evening of if the
xml-metadata could store cd information in an additional attribute in
the <location> tag. Specifically for things like system-config-packages
and anaconda to be able to use the metadata with removable media.


> 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" :)

you know... if you're interested, it would be a fun time to learn the
repomd module for accessing the metadata. :)

-sv






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