> Yes, I too am against screen-scraping. However, UNIX-like interoperability is > not screen scraping. Is this screen-scraping? > > rpm -qa | grep ^perl- | xargs rpm -ql | xargs grep -l ^#!/usr/bin/perl | xargs > perl -c > yes. And it's prone to breaking. Handing back data structures against known modules is less likely to fall apart. this is why we have APIs. This is why yum isn't invoking rpm as a system call. > If there existed a way for yum to provide simple output, separated by > newlines, so that it could be scripted in UNIX fashion then no doubt that > would be great. And it would be a bear to maintain simply so we could be locked down to that format, forever. No thank you. > Taking your argument further, you could say that scriptability is not useful > because you can write C that would do the same thing. It's a question of ease of programming. C is unfun to write in and to deal with all the memory issues. Python is easy to write in and the yum modules aren't hard to use. Heck we have the yum-utils to show examples of just this. Seriously, if you think going down the path to program in python in order to produce a scriptable interface to yum - just write the program you're after in python using the yum modules. -sv
