On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 14:37 -0400, Simon Perreault wrote: > Hello, > > I've been trying to drive yum from a script. I've realized that yum (the > command) is really a command-line GUI, not designed for being scripted the > UNIX way. > > For example: I wanted to get the names of packages available for update. Easy, > I thought, I'll just parse the output of "yum list updates". But there is a > problem with packages whose name is longer than the width of the column for > names. Some packages' name ends "under" the version column. So, what are my > options? > > I'd rather not have to hack a Python wrapper around the Yum libraries to > provide a scriptable interface. Instead, I would like to hack yum itself so > that it presents a scriptable interface when a given command-line option (how > about --scriptable?) is used. > > How about that? Is that a good idea? Am I reinventing the foot or even (gasp!) > shooting myself in the wheel? You'd be doing work that is extremely unlikely to be included in yum if you do that. I've been discouraging screen scraping for a while now b/c it is error-prone and ridiculous when yum has modules intended for use in other scripts. What's wrong with writing a python script that does: import yum and does the rest from there? -sv
