[CentOS] is yum a complete substitute of rpm?

Sat Feb 13 16:27:05 UTC 2010
Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>

On Sat, 13 Feb 2010, Jim Green wrote:

> On 13 February 2010 10:13, Ron Loftin <reloftin at twcny.rr.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, 2010-02-13 at 10:00 -0600, Jim Green wrote:
> >> Dear Centos community,
> >> I am new to centos/redhat and I would like to know on a centos system,
> >> can I use yum alone to do all package management? I don't want to learn
> >> two systems and confuse myself, I understand yum is much better than
> >> rpm if is the case?
> >
> > I expect that you will get a bunch of replies on this.
> >
> > The short form is that yum lives on TOP of RPM.  It is not a replacement
> > for RPM.
> >
> > Yum does most of the thinking for you as far as dependency
> > management. It is much more user-friendly, and is the preferred
> > mechanism for software installation and maintenance because it
> > does the dependency resolution for you, and saves much in the way
> > of headaches, elevated stress, confusion, and RSI from excessive
> > keyboard use.
> >
> > All that being said, there are times when you do want to use RPM
> > by itself, without Yum.  If you stay with CentOS and/or RedHat
> > long enough, you will run across this situation now and then.
>
> Thank Robert and Ron, Could you list an example where I need to use
> rpm command alone? I used rpm to install stand alone package if that
> is the case.

  i suspect there are yum alternatives for some of these but here's
some stuff i like:

  $ rpm -qa			# list all installed packages
  $ rpm -qR <pkgname>		# list dependencies of package
  $ rpm -ql <pkgname>		# display list of files in package
  $ rpm -qf <filename>		# what package is <filename> from?

and many others.

rday
--


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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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