EPEL meeting summary/minutes - 2009-07-17

inode0 inode0 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 19 23:06:13 UTC 2009


On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Rahul
Sundaram<sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On 07/19/2009 04:11 AM, inode0 wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Jesse Keating<jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
>>> On Jul 18, 2009, at 15:07, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> As far as a script helping goes it would only help if it were provided
>>>> by Red Hat has part of RHEL. Otherwise it would not be available
>>>> universally as not everyone uses any particular 3rd party repo. And if
>>>> they (Red Hat) would agree to such a thing, unlikely I think, it might
>>>> as well be part of rpm, like rpm -q
>>>> --where-the-heck-did-this-come-from package.
>>>
>>> Or perhaps a bug reporting URL field in each rpm. Accessable via rpm -qi or
>>> a targetted query.
>>
>> Correct. But while fixing the issue of identifying the source of an
>> rpm inside rpm is appealing in the long term, it isn't going to help
>> the world as it exists today. Such an RFE would probably take a couple
>> of years to get into RHEL and would not be likely to be backported.
>
> Can you file it now, nevertheless?

So I've been giving this some thought. Given that RHEL7 would be the
earliest target release and without backporting or updating RPM in
previous RHEL releases it would take about a decade for this to pan
out, I'm reluctant to pursue it. At least without a very clear idea of
what I really want added anyway.

To answer the original sort of question, where did package foo come
from in the absence of the universal use of repo tags (which is likely
to always be the case with or without EPEL using them) the following
seems adequate to me although I haven't tested it widely

rpm -q --qf "%{PACKAGER}\n" foo

That seems to identify the source at the about the same level you can
get by analysing GPG keys. While it would be nice to be able to
identify the specific repo I can't find any way to do that currently
and would it be worth embarking on a 10 year project to obtain?

As we transition away from up2date there is probably some fairly
simple use of repoquery to obtain useful enough information about the
source repo like

repoquery --qf "%{REPOID}" foo

although that has some limitations, more often than not it likely will
identify the correct repo.

John




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