> Often? No. Occasionally yes, although that tends to be on either a) > ancient b) standalone boxes. Because of the static nature of rpmdb-redhat > it grows more useless over time especially on distro like FC where > packages get renamed during the release lifetime and updates are fast and > furious. What I would miss probably is the formatting capabilities of rpm > --qf which makes it useful from scripts for certain things. I think all that functionality is housed in popt, but yah - I agree it is handy. > comps.rpm has the same problem of being a static entity and a rather > strange beast at that. I wouldn't miss it a single day as long as the > equivalent of comps.xml is somewhere around.. but the information is more > important for systems without network connectivity (or if you just > happen to *love* shuffling CD's back and forth to install stuff) What are these "systems without network connectivity" that you speak of? :) Actually, there was also some discussion this evening of if the xml-metadata could store cd information in an additional attribute in the <location> tag. Specifically for things like system-config-packages and anaconda to be able to use the metadata with removable media. > Oh absolutely, if the command line tool can grok rpm's --queryformat > syntax or equivalent alternative (but compatibility with rpm would be > quite important I think so rpm --qf junkies like me don't have to relearn > a new query "language" :) you know... if you're interested, it would be a fun time to learn the repomd module for accessing the metadata. :) -sv
