I wanted to compare rpms installed on my system with the Scientific Linux/CentOS repository rpms and update any existing rpm if there is large version difference. This is not usually needed as yum will automatically update the packages to its latest version! But, I was interested in finding out how a 'newer version' is determined when 'rpm -U' or 'yum localupdate' is executed.
After some google searches, I came across rpmdev-vercmp tool. This python based tool is a part of rpmdevtools rpm package. This tool requires that you should know epoch, version and release information for each rpm you need to compare.
You can find out this information for any package using:
#rpm -qa --queryformat "'%{NAME}' '%{EPOCH}:%{VERSION}' '%{RELEASE}' '%{ARCH}'\n" |grep package_name
If you wish to know all the query tags, use the following command:
#rpm --querytags
This information extracted needs to be compared with latest rpms from linux repositories and rpmdev-vercmp tool comes in handy. Otherwise, you have to make string comparisons and there is a chance that you might miss a use-case in your code!! So, I decided to use rpmdev-vercmp utility without hesitation.
$ rpmdev-vercmp --help
rpmdev-vercmp <epoch1> <ver1> <release1> <epoch2> <ver2> <release2>
rpmdev-vercmp <EVR1> <EVR2>
rpmdev-vercmp # with no arguments, prompt
Exit status is 0 if the EVR's are equal, 11 if EVR1 is newer, and 12 if EVR2
is newer. Other exit statuses indicate problems.
$ rpmdev-vercmp audit-2.2-2.el6.i686 audit-2.2-2.el6.i686
These are equal
Useful links:
After some google searches, I came across rpmdev-vercmp tool. This python based tool is a part of rpmdevtools rpm package. This tool requires that you should know epoch, version and release information for each rpm you need to compare.
You can find out this information for any package using:
#rpm -qa --queryformat "'%{NAME}' '%{EPOCH}:%{VERSION}' '%{RELEASE}' '%{ARCH}'\n" |grep package_name
If you wish to know all the query tags, use the following command:
#rpm --querytags
This information extracted needs to be compared with latest rpms from linux repositories and rpmdev-vercmp tool comes in handy. Otherwise, you have to make string comparisons and there is a chance that you might miss a use-case in your code!! So, I decided to use rpmdev-vercmp utility without hesitation.
$ rpmdev-vercmp --help
rpmdev-vercmp <epoch1> <ver1> <release1> <epoch2> <ver2> <release2>
rpmdev-vercmp <EVR1> <EVR2>
rpmdev-vercmp # with no arguments, prompt
Exit status is 0 if the EVR's are equal, 11 if EVR1 is newer, and 12 if EVR2
is newer. Other exit statuses indicate problems.
$ rpmdev-vercmp audit-2.2-2.el6.i686 audit-2.2-2.el6.i686
These are equal
Useful links:
