[Yum] How to monitor yum package lists cleanly?

[Tom Limoncelli]

We need to gather (a) the list of installed packages, (b) the list of
packages that need to be upgraded.  However, we have a design requirement
to gather this frequently (every 5 minutes).

How can we gather this information and be as unobtrusive as possible?  i.e.
not use a lot of CPU, get in the way of others, etc.

We've experimented with running "yum list installed -q" and "yum list
check-updates -q".  However we find that sometimes they run for a long time
(longer than 5 minutes).  In that case, we want cleanly be able to kill
them.  (We'd rather not collect a value for that 5-minute interval rather
than cause problems).   Our experiments with sending SIGINT left a lot of
transaction files around, which indicates to us that we should be doing
something different.

Suggestions?

Tom
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