RPMs by Hand: Ouch!

Watching Debian's Advanced Package Tool (apt) at work is an awesome thing to behold. Armed with apt-get and friends, installing a new package is only ever a few keystrokes away:

# apt-get install mypackage

The above command will have apt happily run off, fetch the package from the repository and install it on the system. All the dependancy checking is taken care of--for the most part--automatically. But what does this have to do with the Redhat Package Manager (RPM)? Well, nothing actually.

RPM does not intend to solve the same problem as apt. It's actually analogous to dpkg, Debian's package format and associated tools. Therefore, you can't really fault rpm for the fact that

# rpm -i mypackage.rpm

will most likely come screaming back at you that you are missing a bunch of dependancies.

No. The gripe here is that you really need to have something like apt. If you have a system decended from Debian, based on dpkg, you'll most certainly have apt as well; this is not necessarily the case with some RedHat relatives. Many of the rpm based distros do in fact have an acceptable replacement, while others--*hack* *cough* SuSE--do not.

No. YaST does not count. I am (unfairly?) limiting the field to command line applications. There is no way I'm firing up cruddy old yast just to install a simple package.

This combined by the fact that that you have packages which depend not only on other packages, but also individual files, leaves you in a sticky situation. Thus you are forced to do something ugly and inefficient like the following:

$ find /path/to/rpms -name '*.rpm' | while read package
  do
    rpm -qpl "${package}" | while read file; do
      echo -e "${file}\t${package}"
    done
  done > files-per-package
$ grep 'somestupidlib.so' files-per-package

to find out what you actually need to install. Once you get that list you can go right back to it with

# rpm -i some-other-package-with-1x10^7-deps.rpm

fun no?

P.S. If any SuSE fans out there have a better way of doing this, I'd love to hear it. The Administration Guide provided with SuSE Linux Pro 9.1—I don't have the more recent ones handy—suggests doing something remarkably similar to the above.