just testing different variations of "yum list" and found some
odd behaviour.
first, the man page refers to "yum list [available]", which at
first glance suggests that the word "available" is optional and
using it or not will cause the same behaviour in listing "all
packages in the yum repositories available to be installed."
not so.
"yum list" appears to list all available packages in all repos
that are either newer than installed packages or are not installed
at all on the local host (a fairly lengthy list possibly).
"yum list available", OTOH, appears to list only those packages
for which there is no older current package (a much shorter list).
that's not at all obvious from the man page. one option is to just
clarify this in the man page, but it's not clear why the word
"available" would (or should) have this effect.
in addition, the variation "yum list [args]" claims to "list the
packages specified by args". which packages? as in, which of the
above two are we talking about? if i run
# yum list "*emacs*"
surprisingly, i get two lists -- all of the installed packages
that match the glob (which i didn't ask for), and a shorter list
of "available" packages (which appear to correspond to both newer
packages and packages for which there is no current version
installed. this is not at all intuitive -- to get a list of
installed packages in addition to the available ones.
what about "yum list installed", for which the man page says:
yum list installed
list the packages specified by args. If an argument does not
match the name of an available package, it is assumed to e a
shell-style glob and any matches are printed.
(first, there's no reference to "args" in the sample invocation --
an oversight in the man page, i suspect.)
"yum list installed" does indeed appear to list just the installed
packages, and appears to be reasonably equivalent to "rpm -qa".
but if i try
# yum list installed "*office*"
that final glob argument appears to be ignored, despite what the
man page suggests.
anyway, you get the idea. there's some definitely inconsistent
behaviour here, no?
rday
