AutoRPM

Great stuff
I use autorpm to keep all of our hosts in the network at the same level, for official rpm updates as well as for our local software. Great tool! I couldn't do without!
Although it took some time for the 2.x to work well, it seems to run fine now, and it's very actively maintained. Kirk reacts very fast to bug reports, comments etc.
Great work!

Re: Actively Maintained?

> I've found a couple of
> bugs/problems and mailed Kirk as
> suggested in the docs but he
> doesn't respond. Is this package
> actively being maintained?

I had slacked off for a while, but AutoRPM is now being actively maintained and expanded again.

Actively Maintained?
I've found a couple of bugs/problems and mailed Kirk as suggested in the docs but he doesn't respond. Is this package actively being maintained?

Probs: The pool defs are a bit stale now.
The parsing for the ftp ls output sometimes fails
depending on the site, it may not parse the line and so misses stuff.

Parse fix I hacked up (sorry about wrap/crap):

[sbin]# diff -c autorpm.20000929 autorpm
*** autorpm.20000929 Sun Jan 9 19:42:29 2000
--- autorpm Fri Sep 29 09:19:09 2000
***************
*** 1352,1357 ****
--- 1352,1358 ----
}
}
foreach $Temp (@DirListing) {
+ Inform(' ' . $Temp . "n");
if ( ($LinkName,$LinkDest) = ($Temp =~ /^l[rwxst-]{9}s+S+s+S+s+S+s+[0123456789]+ ... .. [ ]?..[:]?..s+(.*) -> (.*)$/ ) ) {
if ($LinkName eq $CurrFTPDir) {
# The actual directory we are looking at is a symlink, so look at the directory it points to
***************
*** 1385,1395 ****
$RemoteSizes{$LinkDest} = $FileSize;
}
}
! elsif ( ($FileName) = ($Temp =~ /^d[rwxst-]{9}s+S+s+S+s+S+s+[0123456789]+ ... .. [ ]?..[:]?..s+(.*)$/ ) ) {
# Directory...
push @SourceList, $CurrFTPDir . $FileName . '/';
}
! elsif ( ($FileSize, $FileName) = ($Temp =~ /^[rwxst-]{10}s+S+s+S+s+S+s+([0123456789]+) ... .. [ ]?..[:]?..s+(.*)$/ ) ) {
# Regular file...
push @SourceList, $CurrFTPDir . $FileName;
$RemoteSizes{$CurrFTPDir . $FileName} = $FileSize;
--- 1386,1396 ----
$RemoteSizes{$LinkDest} = $FileSize;
}
}
! elsif ( ($FileName) = ($Temp =~ /^d[rwxst-]{9}.*s+... .. [ ]?..[:]?..s+(.*)$/ ) ) {
# Directory...
push @SourceList, $CurrFTPDir . $FileName . '/';
}
! elsif ( ($FileSize, $FileName) = ($Temp =~ /^[rwxst-]{10}s+.*s+([0123456789]+)s+... .. [ ]?..[:]?..s+(.*)$/ ) ) {
# Regular file...
push @SourceList, $CurrFTPDir . $FileName;
$RemoteSizes{$CurrFTPDir . $FileName} = $FileSize;

dependency problems
Autorpm is nice, but it has issues when there are multiple dependencies. It tries to upgrade packages one at a time, which often doesn't work. For example, it can't upgrade netscape:
netscape-communicator 4.72 requires netscape-common = 4.72. This means netscape-common 4.73 can't be installed without breaking the dependency. But, of course, the -communicator 4.73 package can't be installed until -common is updated.

Since Red Hat is splitting out more and more packages this way, this is becoming a crippling problem, making autorpm almost useless.

The solution to this would be to specify all package names on the same rpm command line, so that RPM itself can sort all this out.

Hopefully the next version will fix this.

fails for 6.1 deps ??
when using autorpm for rh6.1, it fails for alot of the update rpms if you have the devel packages installed.

if it tries to upgrade say ORBit, it fails becasue ORBit-devel needs the same version of the non-devel ORBit package.

it fails on similar package pairs.

is there a way to make autorpm smart enough to install both the devel and non devel packages at the same time so the deps are ok?