On Fri, 23 Feb 2007 chris@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I'm thinking that without some kind of existing database or repository of installed RPM's that there's just no way to know what you've got installed, short of getting all the headers of every version of every (recent) package and checking if those files exist in the expected places. No wonder there's no tool for that.
There's /var/log/rpmpkgs, a dump of the names, versions, and archs of all installed RPMs. The dump is taken nightly and rotated weekly by system cron jobs.
So if you then have all listed RPMs in a directory, you could (in principle, at least), rpm -ivh --justdb * and get your database back. Then you could rpm -Va and see what's broke.
Live and learn.
-- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs