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

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at welho.com
Thu Sep 9 06:47:08 UTC 2004


On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, seth vidal wrote:

> 
> > 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.

Yup it's heavily tied into popt but I'm not too familiar with the details 
.. hmm, popt-python anybody? :) Anyway need to have a closer look at how 
the thing works.

> 
> > 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? :) 

Creatures from our worst nightmares? :) 

> 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.

Indeed. People with modem-only internet access <shrudder> still exist and 
for those it's important that the new metadata works with removable media.
And anaconda as well of course.

> 
> > 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. :)

Sure, why not, should be a fun project. I should start having a bit more 
time to use for freetime hacking in a few weeks. If you start something 
let me know.

	- Panu -





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