On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Mike Lococo wrote:
2) You must understand how the yum and rpm os commands work, and
specifically how they each handle dependencies and circular deps
(yum works to satisfy deps, rpm fails unless all deps are specified
on a single command-line).
The use of verb forms projecting overtones of virtues or
deficiency is overstated here. You might have well said:
yum will 'do what I mean, not what I said' even if it
would result in a useless installation and
recklessly add and remove whole swaths of packages to
satisfy deps; rpm will carefully limit itself to not
going beyond what is asked to protect your system until
the person seeking the transaction enumerates all deps
in a single command trasaction
Each program is just a mindless tool, with no capacity for for
beneficence or malice.
Both tools use the RPM database, accessible through 'librpm',
and of course Puppet might be extended to consult this
database natively rather than resorting to the present rather
ugly 'exec' command which ignores this source of information
[thus forcing a need for knowledge of th4 package state and
dependency trees of all potentially packages to manage,
exterior to a specific machine into the equasion]
The program design for Yum is not enabled to proceed to
perform a transaction without the general explicit
confirmation with the '-y' command line option [applicable to
both additions and removals, assuning it has been provided a
set of 'repositories' with 'closure']
RPM (as shipped by Red Hat) is designed to not add or remove
packages which have leaf node dependencies beneath it without
being explicitly instructed to ignore such potential error
conditions: the --nodeps and --force options. The issue of
automated package retrieval and dependency is partially out of
scope for RPM in the for under which Red hat presently ships
it, but can be done inder alternative vendor's approaches,
with a so called 'rpmdb' database
-- Russ herrold
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