[Rpm-metadata] Finding newst version in a repository

[seth vidal]

On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 18:48 +0100, Per Liden wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm parsing a primary.xml and want to find out which version of a 
> specific RPM is the newest version in the repository. In my case I'm 
> parsing primary.xml from fedora 6 updates 
> (ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/pub/fedora/updates/6/i386/repodata) and at 
> the moment it has e.g. autofs of version 5.0.1-0.rc2.22 and 
> 5.0.1-0.rc2.17. What would be the correct way of telling which of these 
> is the newest version? Comparing metadata/package/version/@rel seems a 
> bit too error prone as version numbering styles can differ. 

this is why rpm has certain rules it works under for establishing
newest/oldest. IF the versioning scheme that the program uses doesn't
match this then tough luck.

> It seems 
> that using metadata/package/time/@file or metadata/package/time/@build 
> would work but I guess that's sort of a coincidence as a older version 
> could in theory be build at a more recent time.

indeed


> Any suggestions? I assume yum and other tools has to extract this 
> information in some way?

the yum python modules make figuring out which one is newest pretty
simple, actually.

What is it you're trying to do?

-sv