[Yum] Specifying alternative DB paths with Yum

[Jeremy Redburn]

On 7/15/05, seth vidal <skvidal at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 09:56 -0400, Jeremy Redburn wrote:
> > Is there any way to specify an alternate path to the RPM database in
> > Yum (2.3.4)? With RPM, the --dbpath option accomplishes what I am
> > looking for, but I have not seen any way to have Yum use a database
> > other than the one in /var/lib/rpm.
> 
> to what end? To manage a chroot/buildroot?
> 
> if so then look at --installroot
> 

It's part of a larger project in which we'd like to store the RPM
databases for our entire cluster on a central machine or two. The
eventual idea is to do the dependency checking on the central node(s)
in order to determine which of our machines we want to install a newly
required application onto.

I might be able to shoehorn --installroot into doing what I'm looking
for, but might have better luck patching the code to accept a new conf
option.

Also, is there a dry-run option available? ie. I want to install vim,
please tell me what would be installed but don't actually download or
install anything?