Re: yum: the package manager I love to hate

On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 12:13 -0400, Jake Peavy wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Bryn M. Reeves <bmr@xxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>         On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 11:56 -0400, Jake Peavy wrote:
>         > I'd like to buy a vowel.
>
>
>         Yum is not a package manager.
>
> Huh?  "The Yellowdog Updater, Modified (YUM) is an open-source
> command-line package-
> management utility for RPM-compatible Linux operating systems"

Yeah, I read that about a second after hitting send ;)

What I'm getting at is that yum provides a tool for solving
dependencies, downloading packages and managing repositories of software
but it does this as a layer above the package manager (rpm). A few years
ago it was common to hear statements like "apt is a much better package
manager than RPM" which is kinda an apples-to-oranges comparison. Folks
I knew at the time distinguished between the bits by calling the lower
level (deb/rpm) the package manager and the other bits the "dependency
solver" or whatever but obviously my use is outdated or niche - fixed
that now ;)

>         > Can someone tell me what package xxd is in?
>
>
>         I use this:
>
>         qwhich () { if [ "$1" == "" ]; then echo "usage: qwhich
>         <cmd>" ; fi ;
>         rpm -qf `which $1` ;}
>
>         $ qwhich xxd
>         vim-common-7.2.148-1.fc11.x86_64
>
>
> Again, I don't see that this is a useful technique. If I had it
> installed (such that it appeared in rpm -q or which) I wouldn't need
> to install it.

Nothing in your original mail suggested that you were trying to find out
what package contains something that is not installed. The above is
actually pretty useful and I use it regularly to find what package
installed some binary in $PATH. That might not be useful to you in this
instance but it does answer the question "Can someone tell me what
package xxd is in?".

If you want to answer that question for something not already installed
and have a relatively recent yum then you can use a wildcard as the
argument to whatprovides:

$ sudo rpm -e vim-common vim-enhanced
$ yum whatprovides */xxd
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
updates/filelists_db
| 7.0 MB     00:04

2:vim-common-7.2.148-1.fc11.x86_64 : The common files needed by any
version of the VIM editor
Repo        : fedora
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/bin/xxd

If you're only interested in executables installed in a bin/ directory
then use a pattern like "*bin/xxd".