Re: [SLUG] In defense or RPM (was Amusement for Gentoo nonenthusiasts)

From: Kwan Lowe (kwan@digitalhermit.com)
Date: Tue Dec 07 2004 - 21:25:05 EST


Eben King wrote:

> My biggest complaint about RPM is that, when I try to install some program
> and it says that I need foolib-3.0, that's fine. But it says squat about
> an installed foolib-2.5, so I end up with multiple versions of foolib
> installed.

This is usually the fault of the packaging or an individual
configuration option. RPM does allow multiple versions of the same
package (e.g., several kernels) but you need to specifically allow this.
   What may be happening is that the packager didn't use the correct
version strings. I.e., they may be overloading the name field with
version information to get past the multiple-versions check. Just
looking at an "rpm -qa" listing won't reveal this, however. To really be
sure you'd need to do "rpm -q --queryformat "%{name}\n packagename"
>
> And I don't know of a way to check for installed packages on which nothing
> depends, but that's probably an ID=10t error.
>

You could do things with the --provides and --depends options. I.e.,
build a list of items each package provides then build a list of
dependencies. Eliminate the entries in the provides table that don't
have a corresponding line in the dependencies. What's left are packages
that don't provide anything that other packages need.

BTW, shameless plug for some notes of mine:

http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/rpm/

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