"yum --partial" feature as a bash line

[n0dalus]

On 12/21/05, Panu Matilainen <pmatilai at laiskiainen.org> wrote:
> Wil Cooley wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 16:51 -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>The problem with any of these are that long package names gets mangled
> >>>in the yum output and i haven't found a place to tweak that.
> >>>
> >>
> >>an EXCELLENT reason to never rely on screenscraping.
> >
> >
> > A tool not designed to be connected with other tools?  Sounds like a
> > disregard for one of the best UNIX design principles, to me.
>
> Yum is more of an interactive program than a tool designed to be piped
> into something else - users want a nicely formatted output where the
> update is coming from, progress bars and such, all of which pretty much
> conflicts with piping to other programs (hence the "screen scraping" term).

Just because yum is interactive doesn't mean it shouldn't handle
screen wrapping properly. Notice how `ls` (at least on my system)
shows the results in columns with colours, but when you pipe it, it
automatically outputs as a list without colours. I think this is to do
with detecting the usage of /dev/tty or something (I can't remember).
If python is not capable of doing that kind of thing I would be
surprised.

n0dalus.