On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, seth vidal wrote: > > > 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. Yup it's heavily tied into popt but I'm not too familiar with the details .. hmm, popt-python anybody? :) Anyway need to have a closer look at how the thing works. > > > 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? :) Creatures from our worst nightmares? :) > 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. Indeed. People with modem-only internet access <shrudder> still exist and for those it's important that the new metadata works with removable media. And anaconda as well of course. > > > 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. :) Sure, why not, should be a fun project. I should start having a bit more time to use for freetime hacking in a few weeks. If you start something let me know. - Panu -
