RPM roadmapping

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, Dimi Paun wrote:

> On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 15:40 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>> Or the other way around: what you always
>> wished rpm would do for you? What always annoyed you out of your mind?
>
>  * Version control the meta-information
>    This can't be efficiently done outside RPM, and it would provide
>    an administrator with an invaluable tool (say a malfunction starts
>    at about 4am):
>      - what packages changes are different from yesterday?
>      - what files have changed for package foo between version V and W?
>      - what's the history of package foo on this system?
>    Not very difficult, but quite useful. Every time something breaks
>    on a system (usually via an automatic yum update) I would kill
>    for the ability to run such queries.

Ah, something fresh for a change :) Most of the things that have come up 
in this thread, well lets just say I'd been very surprised if they hadn't 
come up.

>  * Ability to save a pristine copy for the configuration files
>    This would make it a _lot_ simpler to integrate the new .rpmnew
>    files, in a lot of cases being as simple as:
>        diff foo.pristine foo | patch -o foo foo.rpmnew
>    At the very least to provide some sort of mechanism that would
>    permit an external trigger to so easily and efficiently.
>
> This maybe already implemented (never checked in depth the transaction
> triggers), but a mechanism for external tools to hook into the
> transactions would be great. More generally, the external triggers must
> be given enough information about the current transaction to be able to
> know the delta that the transaction introduces without having to scan
> the entire state of the system. As a litmus test, you should be able to
> implement the version control idea mentioned above via this mechanism
> easily and efficiently.

I've been thinking of somewhat different use case, but one of my plans is 
to indeed make information about the current transaction available to 
(lua-)scripts. I already have written beginnings of lua-rpm bindings, once 
that's in usable shape and integrated, scripts could look at current 
transaction member packages, their files etc and do decisions based on 
that info.

 	- Panu -