On Aug 1, 2011, at 7:31 AM, Jeff Johnson wrote:
>
> On Aug 1, 2011, at 4:42 AM, Michael Baudisch wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>> i do some tests with RPM and somehow "bad" packages. When I pass a "bad"
>> test package to RPM I observered that there's an error like "error: open of
>> blablabla failed". The package is a plain text file with .rpm extension
>> containing only "blablabla".
>> But when I put this "blablabla" in squared brackets ("[Blablabla]") there's
>> no error.
>> So, what is the magic that does RPM not detect/report a corrupt package? Are
>> there other circumstances under which RPM does not detect/report a "bad"
>> package? Thanks for help in advance.
>>
>
> What rpm version?
>
> All input arguments that are not *.rpm packages
> are treated as a manifest of *.rpm packages.
>
What may not be clear here is this:
Technically there are no "bad packages": everything that isn't a package
is treated as a manifest. Manifests are checked for non-printable
characters.
> The manifest is split on white space and each item is added
> at that position in the argument list.
>
The items can actually be glob patterns: so adding square brackets
turns a string into a character range.
> Not reporting is not the same as not detecting.
> Did rpm actually attempt to install anything?
>
Arguments that don't exist are silently skipped.
Consider this
touch empty
rpm -Uvh empty
This is semantically equivalent to an invocation with no arguments: the file is
empty.
But there are differences in behavior because there is an augment: the
mani9fest,
but the manifest is empty, and so one sees different behavior.
73 de Jeff
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