"apt" to eventaully replace "rpm"?

[Dave Burns]

On Nov 25, 2007 10:27 AM, John Summerfield
<debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote:
> (which might be the reviewer's), Try this example:
>
> rpm -qa --qf '%vendorn' | sort | uniq -c
>       1 Adobe Systems, Incorporated
>     12 (none)
>       1 RealNetworks, Inc
> 838 Red Hat, Inc.
>       1 Sun Microsystems

I did. I got one of these per package:

error: incorrect format: missing { after %

Am I using the wrong shell? Have some alias defined that is screwing
it up? I was pleased to find a description of --qf in the rpm man page
(no examples of course) but no reference to %vendorn. Is it a typo?

I tried to take the advice of the error message...

rpm -qa --qf '%{vendorn}' | sort | uniq -c

error: incorrect format: unknown tag

Various other simpleminded variants fail. Apparently someone familiar
with printf might be able to fix this, but I am clueless. Is there a
way to make it work?

Dave