yum: the package manager I love to hate

[Jake Peavy]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 12:40 PM, Bryn M. Reeves <bmr at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 12:13 -0400, Jake Peavy wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Bryn M. Reeves <bmr at redhat.com>
> > wrote:
> >         On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 11:56 -0400, Jake Peavy wrote:
> >         > I'd like to buy a vowel.
> >
> >
> >         Yum is not a package manager.
> >
> > Huh?  "The Yellowdog Updater, Modified (YUM) is an open-source
> > command-line package-
> > management utility for RPM-compatible Linux operating systems"
>
> Yeah, I read that about a second after hitting send ;)
>
> What I'm getting at is that yum provides a tool for solving
> dependencies, downloading packages and managing repositories of software
> but it does this as a layer above the package manager (rpm). A few years
> ago it was common to hear statements like "apt is a much better package
> manager than RPM" which is kinda an apples-to-oranges comparison. Folks
> I knew at the time distinguished between the bits by calling the lower
> level (deb/rpm) the package manager and the other bits the "dependency
> solver" or whatever but obviously my use is outdated or niche - fixed
> that now ;)
>

haha ok, I guess I feel like it's MORE accurate to say yum is a package
manager because it manages the RPM packages, but I digress.  Semantics was
never my strong suit, thus engineering over law :p


>
> >         > Can someone tell me what package xxd is in?
> >
> >
> >         I use this:
> >
> >         qwhich () { if [ "$1" == "" ]; then echo "usage: qwhich
> >         <cmd>" ; fi ;
> >         rpm -qf `which $1` ;}
> >
> >         $ qwhich xxd
> >         vim-common-7.2.148-1.fc11.x86_64
> >
> >
> > Again, I don't see that this is a useful technique. If I had it
> > installed (such that it appeared in rpm -q or which) I wouldn't need
> > to install it.
>
> Nothing in your original mail suggested that you were trying to find out
> what package contains something that is not installed. The above is
> actually pretty useful and I use it regularly to find what package
> installed some binary in $PATH. That might not be useful to you in this
> instance but it does answer the question "Can someone tell me what
> package xxd is in?".
>
> If you want to answer that question for something not already installed
> and have a relatively recent yum then you can use a wildcard as the
> argument to whatprovides:
>
> $ sudo rpm -e vim-common vim-enhanced
> $ yum whatprovides */xxd
> Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
> updates/filelists_db
> | 7.0 MB     00:04
> 2:vim-common-7.2.148-1.fc11.x86_64 : The common files needed by any
> version of the VIM editor
> Repo        : fedora
> Matched from:
> Filename    : /usr/bin/xxd
>
> If you're only interested in executables installed in a bin/ directory
> then use a pattern like "*bin/xxd".
>

Sorry, I wasn't clear enough originally.

And I guess I assumed that yum had the wildcarded behavior built in (seems
to me that it should anyway).

Regardless, thanks for the assistance.  I'll remember this next time I go
head to head with yum.

-- 
-jp


Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, we
should be thinking about getting more use out of the ones we already have.

deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com
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