Tag Archives: yum

Viewing package changelogs with yum

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To quickly review the latest changes to an rpm package, there’s a handy plugin for yum called yum-changelog. It’s part of the Fedora repository and can be installed by invoking The usage is quite self-explanatory, but here a a few useful examples anyway: To list the whole changelog history of a package, run To list the changelog of a specific… Read more »

Search for a package containing a certain file

Assumed you want to find the package that contains the shared object libGLU.so.1, e.g. because a binary is dynamically linked against it, and ldd tells you that the shared library requirements are not met. On Fedora (or any yum-type os) you’d run and yum would tell you, that mesa-libGLU comes with /usr/lib64/libGLU.so.1 which could fulfill your need (could because you… Read more »

How to list rpm packages from certain repository

Usually, rpm –queryformat can be used to generate all sorts of rpm package listing. You could, for example, use the vendor tag to separate the packages that are tagged with RPM Fusion from the list of all installed packages (rpm -qa): Unfortunately, there is no 1:1 mapping between rpm’s vendor tag and the install repository. In some cases, the vendor… Read more »

Installing yum build dependencies with yum-builddep

After fiddling around with rpmbuild for quite a while, I stumbled upon yum-builddep. It’s basically a tool to install all packages required to rebuild an RPM package from the SRPM. So if you want to install all “BuildRequires” mentioned in the spec file of a package, invoke The source RPM for the specified package must be available in the yum… Read more »

Visualizing rpm dependencies with Graphviz

Sometimes, rpm dependencies get rather complex. It’s not always easy for an rpm maintainer to keep track of the runtime requirements of his package and therefore, huge rpm dependency trees develop. And it’s even more difficult so see which packages get pulled by yum, because only a tiny part of those are actually listed as requirements in the spec file…. Read more »

Dealing with .rpmnew and .rpmsave files

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When an upgrade includes changes to a default configuration file, the package will write either a .rpmnew or a .rpmsave file instead of overwriting the configuration file on your system. Which file a package creates is up to the discretion of the package maintainer. From “Dealing with .rpmnew and .rpmsave files” By Bruce Byfield: An .rpmnew file contains the new… Read more »