[TriLUG] good newbie book

[Tanner Lovelace]

Mike Broome wrote:


> That's pretty much sums up what I ended up writing.  Plus being able to
> pass in a string to search for and a list of files (or a glob) to search
> over.  Then I added some status messages so you knew it was actually
> doing something (since it takes a looong time to grub through all the
> RPMs on a 2x CDROM on a P100).  When I started trying to build up a list
> of filenames to display after the loop, I decided that I should have
> written it in Perl. :)  But it worked.  I *love* a programmable shell.
> 
> But we were wondering if there is a way of doing that without leaving
> the confines of rpm.  Or if there's a practical way of doing that for
> people who don't write shell scripts.  It seems like the RH installer
> (Anaconda?) does this for you when you get to the end of the install and
> it tells about the dependencies you are missing and can automagically
> install the needed rpms.  Anyone know if there's anyway to get that
> functionality (or get the rpm install part of the installer) after the
> initial install?
> 
> Mike
> 
> 

Hi Mike,

Well, this isn't really applicable to you since you're using redhat,
but in mandrake, I can type

urpmf libfoo

and it will give me a list of all packages, installed or not,
that have the regular expression libfoo inside their filelist.
Once you know what package you need, you can type

urpmi <package name>

and it will install that package and any dependency it needs.
You can also set this up to be used by a non-root user if you
want to (you setup where it gets the files from, so it won't
allow the user to install just anything...)

I don't want to disparage anything redhat has done, as I am
very much in awe of all they do, but several of the other
rpm distributions (mandrake, conectiva) have something similar
to this included and it might behoove redhat to look into
something similar.  (I realize, however, that there are probably
a million things they would like to do to the distribution
that are all competing for time.. :-)  I wouldn't think it
would be too hard, however, since presumably they could just
take the (GPL'd) code from somewhere else and work with it directly.
Mandrake's urpmi is based on ideas take from debian's apt and
Conectiva linux just went and adapted apt itself to work with rpm files.

Hmm.. that reminds me.  Apparently, someone else has adapted apt
to work with other distributions than Conectiva and I seem to
remember hearing about someone who had setup a Redhat 7.2
repository that was "apt-enabled".  That would allow you to
just install apt on your redhat system and use that.  Anyone
have any more information on that?

Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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