[Yum-devel] repoquery/yumquery/something

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, seth vidal wrote:

> Hi everyone,

Hello! (bet you didn't expect to see me here :)

>  Some discussion has popped up about having a command line tool that's
> able to query the repodata just like rpm is able to query rpmdbs.
> 
> So a few thoughts on this:
> 
> 1. I'm comfortable shipping a tool like this _in_ the yum package. If
> people would rather have it separate I can understand that, too.

Lets see how it goes. You can always split it out of the yum package if 
that comes an issue, eg the repomd python libraries + utils that use them 
into separate package or something.

> 
> 2. It might be handy to be able to read a yum.conf to get to the
> repositories. Alternatively we could simply allow the path to the
> repodata to be specified on the cli:
> 
>  repoquery --repodata=url://some/where/out/there ---repodata=url://some/
> other/place/out/there

Cli override good. What I'd actually like to see is the repository configs
be split out of yum.conf and into /etc/repodata.conf or such and
everything that uses the new repodata model using that instead of
/etc/yum.conf, /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources etc.

Another related thing: standardizing on the metadata download place, eg 
/var/cache/repodata and again everything using that instead of 
/var/state/apt/.. etc.

> 
> 3. setting up a dict-like-object class to the packageObject class in
> repomd shouldn't be much trouble and that could afford lots of
> usefulness for mapping out strings like %(name)s

Sounds nice. Having slept over this idea I've come to the conclusion I 
don't give a rats a** whether it's rpmquery compatible or not - in fact it 
might be better just to start off clean without any silly compatibility 
burdens. Besides, rpm's default query output format predates multilib 
(and various other things) leading to silliness like:
[pmatilai at linox01 pmatilai]$ rpm -q glibc
glibc-2.3.2-95.20
glibc-2.3.2-95.20

..when it actually should list the arch in there as well without resorting 
to --qf tricks, which the average joe user certainly doesn't know about 
and wonders why he has two glibc's installed.

	- Panu -