Re: rpm calling rpm?

[James Olin Oden <joden malachi lee k12 nc us>]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Axel Thimm wrote:

> Is it safe to call rpm -Uhv in rpm scripts (thinking of %post)?  Maybe
> even uninstalling itself?

I don't think doing an upgrade within an rpm is yet possible (though,
this area has been forward quite rapidly so I could be wrong).  Certainly,
you can do queries, but I must warn you if you expect the rpm to be
installed via anaconda, queries will work but you get all kinds of
weird warnings related to cursors, because your script is running
in a chrooted environment, whereas anaconda is not (but their both
accessing the same database).
 
> If someone wonders where these sick ideas come from: the idea is to
> create monolithic rpms for certain rpms with high dependencies like
> xmltv or mythtv. 
Yeah, that is the same concept as HP/UX package cluster, unfortunately,
you can't do exactly that with rpm.  What you can do, and has been done
is create rpm's that contain no files, but have dependencies for the
whole set of rpms you need.  In this way, you can make sure that all
of these package get installed together.  Also, rpm has a solver 
capability (that I don't fully understand) that can hook into another
rpm database (such as rpmdb-redhat) and determine what other packages 
need to be installed that meet dependencies.  I am not sure if this
is exposed to the commandline or not?

Cheers...james
> Users w/o apt/yum are not delighted downloading a
> dozen of packages, possibly scattered around different
> directories. So I consider the idea of packaging babuschka rpms and
> and installing them in %post, while deinstalling the container rpm.
>