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RPM DB Descriptions

For creating an HTML-ized report of the descriptions of installed RPM packages, or directories of RPM files.

The Stuff

Sample Output showing installed rpm database descriptions: (view a sample (Large. 306K file) report)

Sample Output showing sample of a directory of rpm files available for downloading from the page, and their descriptions. Also demonstrates the use of the switches for xhtml, pretty-print output, and the Definition List format (use View Source in your browser to see the difference between this, and the above): (view an additional sample)

The Program itself: (currently version 1.0) rpmdbdescr.tgz

Requirements:

• Perl 5.6.0 or later
• The Pod::Usage module must be installed, to display the documentation on --usage or erroneous input.
• The CGI.pm Perl module must be installed. (Recommended version at this time is 3.10 or later.)
• A version of Linux that uses the RPM package install system (Red Hat, Fedora Core, etc.)

The Story

I got annoyed and tired, one afternoon, of checking each individual installed package one at a time while researching the various tools and programs that get installed with Red Hat (via rpm -qf `where programname` and then rpm -qi packagename), and coded up a short routine to generate a table or definition-list HTML-style output file of ALL the installed RPM Packages, sorted by package name.

This then made it easier for me to read up on the things that interested me or caught my eye while looking for others. It's a nice succinct overview of the packages that you can review (or re-review) at your leisure. :-)

New!

At the prompting of an online acquaintence, I've added many new features to this program, not the least of which is the ability to generate a report on a directory of rpm files, as well as changing the Title, or switching from HTML 4.0x to XHTML. This is particularly useful for people who package up groups of rpms for various distributions and want an easy way to generate a descriptive download-linked HTML page of all the files in the directory, for posting to the web.

Download the new version and run perldoc rpmdbdescr.pl for a complete description of all options, or perl rpmdbdescr.pl --usage for the brief overview and synopsis.

For a good example of usage, here's how I indexed the contents of one of my Fedora Core install CDROMs:

$ perl rpmdb/rpmdbdescr.pl --inputdir=/mnt/cdrom/Fedora/RPMS/ --xhtml --title="Fedora Core 1 (DISC 2) RPMS" --outfile=FC1.cdrom2.rpms.htm