[Rpm-maint] Rally: minor API requests

[Michael Schroeder]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 10:09:24AM +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Nov 2007, Maxim Udushlivy wrote:
> >(1)
> >  The first is very small and is about the way to check RPM database 
> >modification time. This is crucial for a GUI application as in order to 
> >run smoothly it must have a full list of installed RPM's with a minimal 
> >delay after start. Rally uses a fast internal cache which should be 
> >updated only if some RPM's were installed or erased since the last run. 
> >Currently I do the same as the Smart package manager: use stat(2)/st_mtime 
> >on "/var/lib/rpm/Packages" file, but a specialized function would make RPM 
> >API a bit more complete. As an alternative that function may return the 
> >number of transactions committed to the database.
> 
> Sounds entirely reasonable to me, there are a number of users (smartpm, 
> apt-rpm ...) that would benefit. Whatever the implementation, it needs to 
> abstract out any backend DB details (as rpm supports BDB and SQLite 
> backends for the DB)

Here's another idea I use in my little installer project: add
an interface that returns all database ids of all installed
packages (i.e. the numbers that you specify with --querybynumber).
With that information you can easily retrieve just the changed
packages from the rpm database.

Cheers,
  Michael.

-- 
Michael Schroeder                                   mls at suse.de
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF Markus Rex, HRB 16746 AG Nuernberg
main(_){while(_=~getchar())putchar(~_-1/(~(_|32)/13*2-11)*13);}