What's on my system...

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 15:14 +0100, DB wrote:
> Hi all (today is my day for getting several ideas off my chest!!!!)
> 
> Having used "shhhh, you know what"  for many years, with its "add/remove 
> programs" which tells when I last used a program; and its subset 
> "add/remove windoze elements",  I'm wondering how I can do the same in FC9.
>
> Recently, one of the threads here showed the yum --installed & yum 
> extras, which I tried.  a) I couldn't see any sort of "last used" 
> indicator  (or even better a "never used" indicator)  b) the things I 
> hand-install, like the driver for my (still not working) Creative Webcam 
> or my Reiner cyberjack  aren't (don't appear to be) listed.

The yum system doesn't manage programs, it manages packages, each of
which can contain multiple programs, libraries, documents, config files
etc., some of which can overlap with other packages, so the short answer
is "you can't".

However in Linux there's always a way :-) Take a look at sa(1).

As regards "hand-installed" stuff, if you didn't use yum to install it,
then yum doesn't know about it and you're on your own. This is a
compelling reason to use yum for everything.

> Since I want to migrate toward FC10, I'd like to find me a list of the 
> things which I use, so as to have a more targeted installation, without 
> all the bells, whistles, pots & pans that "someone" has decided I ought 
> to have (and not to forget one of those essential "it only works 
> if....."  thingies).  It'd also be "very nice" if it were possible to 
> "reverse engineer" the installations I've made so as to produce my own 
> installation script.

/var/log/yum.log lists everything installed in chronological order.

> And... how can I tell if a package is "mission 
> critical" to the life of Fedora??

Depends on your mission. The only things you absolutely need are the
kernel+modules, and some stuff like a Shell. You may consider that too
minimalist, but it's your call. 'rpm -q --whatrequires <package>' will
list everything that depends directly on <package>. For a more complete
list, try 'yum erase <package>'.

poc