Re: How to install a bunch of RPMS if some are already installed?

[Kirk Bauer <kirk kaybee org>]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Harry Putnam wrote:

> > Hmmm ... sounds like you might mean this:
> >
> >   http://freshmeat.net/projects/autorpm/
> 
> Yeah and apt-get as well but remember, this is unix land we are
> talking about.  A place where people routinely write scripts to handle
> stuff like this.  

That's what AutoRPM started out being... a script to handle this stuff
;)

Now, I'm the author of AutoRPM, so I'm a bit biased, but I would
recommend giving it a shot.

I needed to do the exact same thing you want to do for work.  I thought
AutoRPM was overkill for what I needed to do, and it was just one more
thing to install.  So, I spent a few hours working on doing it with a
more simple script, but it became too complicated.

So, I installed AutoRPM and it has worked great ever since.  I also have
things setup so that each system is a member of one or more "groups" and
those groups define what RPMs should be installed on each system.  If a
package is not in any group, it is assumed to be a base group.
Conveniently, these are the same groups that I have defined in my custom
Red Hat installation.  

I also have AutoRPM delete packages that shouldn't be installed and
even, if necessary, downgrade packages.  This is because we often take a
set of systems and downgrade to an older version to fix bugs, etc.