diff between rpm's '--whatprovides' and '-f'

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 19, 2004, Matt Hansen <helios82 at optushome.com.au> wrote:

> So, how can one if at all be used differently to the other? The man page
> states that the "-f" option is used to 'Query package owning FILE' while
> the "--whatprovides" is used to 'Query all packages that provide the
> CAPABILITY capability'. So these words might suggest they can do
> different things, but my example above doesn't think so.. What exactly
> is a "capability" defined as?

A capability can be a file, but it can also be an arbitrary name that
a package provides.  For example, on FC2 (with X.org X11, no XFree86):

[aoliva at free aoliva]$ rpm -q --whatprovides XFree86-libs
xorg-x11-libs-6.7.0-2
[aoliva at free aoliva]$ rpm -qf XFree86-libs
error: file XFree86-libs: No such file or directory

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}