Dear all, We are developing a new toolsuite for the automated installation, configuration and management of clusters and farms running Linux (see http://quattor.org for more information). The Quattor information model is based on the distinction between the "desired state" and the "actual state" of nodes. Regarding to software packages, we have a Software Package Management Agent that reads a configuration file with the target packages, compares it with the currently installed packages, computes the necessary install/deinstall/upgrade operations, and invokes the packager with the right operation transaction set. The problem is that the current version of rpm can not handle multiple operations on multiple packages in a single transaction. Just imagine that you want to install 'foo' and 'bar' RPMs replacing another RPM called 'foobar'. How can I order the operations respecting dependencies, validate, and execute the complete operation in one go? This is currently not possible in RPM (an 'rpm -e --test foobar' followed by 'rpm -i --test foo bar' does evidently not work). What we have done to solve this problem is to develop a new software packager (called rpmt) built on top of rpmlib to handle those lists of transactions (if you are interested, you can download the source code from http://datagrid.in2p3.fr/cvsweb/edg-quattor/rpmt-4.2.1) As we have seen, rpmlib is ready to handle such lists of transactions. It is possible to use rpmtsAddInstallElement() and rpmtsAddEraseElement() within the same transaction set. So, it seems that it would be not very difficult to extend rpm to handle lists of transactions. We really do not understand why it is not possible to do with rpm something like: rpm -U package_1.rpm -e package_2 We would like to know if you think it is interesting to extend rpm in this direction, or if you have plans to do so. Even, we offer ourselves to provide a patch to rpm implementing the new functionality, if it is necessary. Thanks in advance. -- Rafael Angel Garcia Leiva Universidad Autonoma Madrid http.//www.uam.es/angel.leiva _______________________________________________ Rpm-list mailing list Rpm-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rpm-list
