rpmvercmp (was: dovecot imap available for testing, latest upstream release 0.99.10.6)

[James Olin Oden]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Michal Jaegermann wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 02:23:53PM -0400, John Dennis wrote:
> > 
> > No assumptions should be made about the format of the release string
> > other than it collate correctly when presented to rpmvercmp (the
> > comparison function in rpm which has specific well defined semantics).
> 
> How you are using rpmvercmp, say, in a shell script?  AFAIK there is
> no interface which would make that available.  Or this is one of
> those undocumented mysteries of rpm?
>
Hi Michal, look back through the messages about a month and you will
see a message concerning rpm package versions that I answered that pretty
muchh answers your question.  In short its pretty easy to use the python
bindings or perl (RPM2) bindings to librpm to access rpmvercmp().  In my 
original post, I think I gave a short inline perl example (i.e. a tiny 
script using perl -e option to pass the script from the command line).
I definately do this at my work in various shell scripts.


Cheers..james  
> > Unfortunately we are pretty much stuck with n-v-r for historical
> > reasons.
> 
Yep and you cannot forget epoch.

> This I can reliably pick apart using --queryformat but now what?
> 
> In case you wonder if I need that in shell scripts and similar then
> the answer is that indeed I do (and many others too).  A comparison
> utility which would compare (or even collate but that I can do
> myself) according to rpmvercmp would be really useful.
>
Again search back through the archives and you will see code to that 
effect.  Really what would be quite handy though for shell scripts is
a utility that could be called in the following ways:

	rpmvercmp -v 1.1.1 -v 1.1.2
	rpmvercmp -p x-1.1.1-2.0.i386.rpm -d
	rpmvercmp -p x-1.1.1-2.0.i386.rpm -p x-1.1.2-1.1.i386.rpm
	rpmvercmp -p x-1.1.1-2.0.i386.rpm -v 1.1.2
	rpmvercmp -n x -v 1.1.2 -d

So basically, allow you to compare a:

	- E:V-R string to an E:V-R string,
	- package to the package in the db
	- package to another package.
	- package to an E:V-R string
	- E:V:R string for a specific N to the database.

Would not be too hard to create such a script from RPM2 (and I suspect
easy to do so with the python bindings).  Unfortunately, I am tied up in
non-rpm endevours at the moment, or I would gladly wip it up and send it
to the list.  Maybe tonight I will have time, but no promises.

Cheers...james 
>    Michal
> 
> 
>