RPM is really great for managing packages under Linux. Its ability to
download the package from an FTP site makes upgrades of individual
packages relatively easy. What I'm surprised about is that the RedHat
FTP site makes it so difficult to find interesting packages.
Basically, if you don't know what a package does by its name, you're
out of luck unless you download it so that you can do a Info Query on
it (rpm -qi). This is expensive and time consuming.
I'm surprised no one has suggested to RedHat a simple batch job to
make it easier for people to find packages of interest. Off the cuff,
if they could run a batch job like below, that would be really nice:
# ================ Batch job
cd /
find . -name "Index.rpm_info" -print | xargs rm -f
find . -name "*.rpm" -print | xargs geninfo.sh
find . -name "Index.rpm_info" | xargs pr -f > /Master_Index.rpm_info
# ================ [eof]
# ================ Geninfo Shell
for x
do
basename $x > $x_info
rpm -qip $x >> $x_info
cat $x >> `dirname $x`/Index.rpm_info
done
# ================ [eof]
At least this way, one could go to the Redhat FTP site, download the
RPM_INFO files in the directories of interest, and, by perusing those
files, get a basic idea of each package in the directory and, perhaps,
find a new package they'd be interested in trying out.
What say you, Red Hat? Would you be willing to put this batch job
into place? Extra credit if you do it with HTML and attach it to the
Red Hat web-page... :-)
--
David Masterson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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