Fedora 7 Update: vim-7.1.12-1.fc7

[Don Russell]

Mauriat M wrote:
> On 7/11/07, Don Russell <fedora at drussell.dnsalias.com> wrote:
>> I received this update message on the fedora-package-announce list this
>> morning:
>> Fedora 7 Update: vim-7.1.12-1.fc7
>>
>> I used rpm -q vim to see which version I already have and was very
>> surprised at the result:
>> package vim is not installed
>>
>> Say what? I use vim all the time.
>>
>> "yum whatprovides vim" told me vim is provided by vim-enhanced
>>
>> Q: Why does this cause me grief?
>> A: I have automated mail handling that determines if these update
>> notices apply to my system, discarding those that do not (because I
>> already have the specified version installed, or the packageis not
>> installed at all)
>>
>> So, when I see there's an update to "vim", my code does an rpm -q vim to
>> see if vim is installed, and since that's not the correct name of the
>> package, I get a false negative.
>>
>> What would it take to have this package actually be called vim-enhanced
>> in the update notice?
>>
>> Or, perhaps to be more robust, if I get a "package not installed", I
>> should dig deeper before deciding it doesn't aply and do a"what
>> provides..." then check THAT result.
>>
>
> I am going to take a guess that your "automated" mail handling only
> parses the subject line of the mail? ... I'm sure you realize the
> package name in the email subject line represents the SRC package, not
> necessarily every single binary RPM package.

I parse the body of the message where it says
Name : ...
Product: ...
Version: ...
Release: ...


>
> I would say the problem lies in your script, not the actual email.
> Here is 1 possible idea: you should instead try looking at the body of
> the email and use some sort of regex to parse out the individual
> binary packages (i.e. the list at the end of the email). Once you
> filter out for your arch, then run whatever logic you have in place to
> see if it applies to you.

That's an idea... in the mean time, I've changed my "rpm -q <name>" to 
"rpm -q --whatprovides <name>", and it's working better.
But, thanks for the input... I'll look into parsing the list of items at 
the end of the e-mail. Good idea. :-)

Note, I dropped the idea of using yum whatprovides because rpm -q 
--whatprovides is simpler and seems to do what I wanted.

I like your idea.. it will be more robust. :-)