[CentOS] updates to package

Tue Apr 12 12:28:12 UTC 2011
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

On 04/12/2011 01:06 PM, Bernard Fay wrote:
> Well, I would like to know what will be the changes before we apply the
> updates.  I would like to generate a kind of a report showing what will
> be the changes for all packages with available updates.
>
> Is there a way to do it?
>

The way to do that would be to use the yum-security plugin, however we 
dont publish information needed to make it work ( mostly due to legal 
reasons on where that data comes from, how its parsed and pushed out ).

There are 2 things that are being worked on : the spacewalk community 
has scripts that will parse this info from within packages and present 
it in a usable state. And secondly, I've been working on a yaml based 
script that can do something similar and hope to have it in a usable 
state soon ( for where soon ~ a month or so ).

The other option you have, if you fancy a bit of code writing, is to use 
the yum-changelog plugin to parse what comes through the package 
manifests and make decisions on things that way - keep in mind that its 
a maze and you will need some level of smartness. Its not as drastic an 
issue on CentOS as it can get in other distro's but its still something 
you will need to handle ( eg. not all SA's are relevant without a BA or 
an EA released in the past ).

- KB