On Thu, 5 Jul 2007, David Mathog wrote:
An issue regarding RPM came up in the Mandriva list, and somebody
suggested I bring it to the attention of the RPM developers. That
thread is here:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.os.linux.mandriva/browse_thread/thread/5a45dac692db1455/ee5add1f47c1475e?lnk=st&q=mathog+rpm+link&rnum=3#ee5add1f47c1475e
In case that link wraps and breaks, the main issue is this:
rpm packages are creating links to links to files, and the first link
and the second link are not known to the RPM system via, for instance:
rpm -q --whatprovides /usr/bin/cdrecord
Similarly, it has been claimed that installation scripts can create
entire files (not links to files) which are also not known to RPM. This
struck me as incomplete - if the RPM package creates a file, no matter
how it creates it, then the RPM system should be able to verify
that fact.
Rpm doesn't create the links and files in this case, it's a script forked
from rpm that creates them. Tracking of file creation of scripts might be
technically possible, but you just can't record any arbitrary file
creation into rpmdb. Think about temporary files the scripts and apps run
by scripts can create as side-effects for example.
I can see how the filename might in some instances not
be known ahead of time, but couldn't rpm implement a function
something like:
rpm --pkg $PACKAGENAME --provides /usr/bin/cdrecord
so that when scripts do create links or files they have a mechanism
to enter this information?
Right, this is something entirely different, and something that's already
been briefly discussed to support 3rd party vendor installer scripts and
such. Permitting recording file ownership into rpmdb outside of real rpm
packages would change the whole concept of rpms, and thus can't be done
lightly, but it's something to look into in the future.
To permit rpm scriptlets to record something into rpmdb has the nasty
problem of requiring concurrent write-access to the rpmdb. Not impossible
but very nasty with the current locking system.
As long as I'm writing to this list, I've also wondered if there
isn't another way to find which packages B,C,D require package A
besides doing:
rpm -e --test A
It seemed that this should be in the -q group, something like:
rpm -q --requirespkg libjpeg
(the package, not a particular file), but I've never figured out
how to do it like that.
Yup, a long-time "favorite" of mine. Rpm has supported --whatrequires for
ages, but that only works for manual dependencies, not automatically
collected ones. Consider this:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ rpm -q --whatrequires openssl|wc -l
6
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ rpm -e --test openssl.x86_64 2>&1 |awk '{print
$6}'|sort -u|wc -l
43
You can get pretty close with this:
rpm -q --whatrequires `rpm -q --provides openssl`|grep -v "no package"|sort -u
But yes, there should be an easier way to do this, rpm knows perfectly
well what packages a given package *really* requires, so there should be
a way to query it as well without resorting to trickery like the above.
- Panu -
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