Chapter 10. Rpm management elements

10.1. Why avoid RPM?
10.2. Documentation in the package
10.3. Configuration files in the package
10.4. File ownership
10.5. Database backup and rebuild
10.6. Importing keys
10.7. List imported keys

As the reader will have realized throughout this manual, YUM and PackageKit can resolve most of the systems administrator needs when managing software for Fedora systems. There remains some edge cases where you can not have a satisfactory answer at high level, with YUM and PackageKit. For such cases the lower level tool rpm must be used and you must understand how crucial it is. This section does not attempt to give complete information of RPM system operation or all of its configuration options, but to offer a complementary survival introductory guide to RPM in order to avoid the read of the full manual for at least the following cases.

10.1. Why avoid RPM?

In this chapter introduction it has not been said why an administrator should avoid using rpm in the daily software management. One of the reason is because it is a "low level" tool, which means that upper level tools, YUM and PackageKit, are not notified about the use of rpm. YUM will notify the user about a change to the rpm database made by an foreign application.

Generally you will want to avoid this type of messages and keep software management as simple and unified as possible. Of course, you may always find certain unresolvable cases in which you will have no choice but to use rpm to solve the problem or particular case.

It will be manifested as an interference

yum will log and output as an interference the access to RPM system.

$ yum install ...\t\t\t\t
\t\t\t\t...
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum.
...