Rpm Command Option
We located an application recommended by one of customers for sharing certain data. It was available for installation using a few different methods. Using yum was also recommended for the installation. The install instructions began with what appeared to be a fairly typical command as indicated below (with the URL slightly altered).
sudo rpm –import https://rpm.xxxxx.com/rpmrepo.key
To our junior employee assigned to perform the install on a test system, it seemed like a good idea to do some checking on the rpm option –import indicated in those instructions. They did not find the –import in any of the 14 pages of the CentOS 7 man page for rpm.
Some Google searches indicated that the –import option does exist. The repo setup and application installation all went well and took only about three minutes. The app is also working as intended.
Is there some good reason for –import being left out of the manual page?
4 thoughts on - Rpm Command Option
That’s a really interesting question, but probably better directed at rpm directly:
http://lists.rpm.org/mailman/listinfo/rpm-list or https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/issues
—
Orion Poplawski Manager of NWRA Technical Systems 720-772-5637
NWRA, Boulder/CoRA Office FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane orion@nwra.com Boulder, CO 80301 https://www.nwra.com/
Well I wouldn’t called obvious, but the rpm man page has a “see also”
for rpmkeys(8) and this man page documents the rpm key related options.
I don’t know how it came to be that rpm –import just quietly does rpmkeys –import without documenting it though…
/Peter
The source has it here:
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/blob/master/rpmpopt.in#L198
(this is how rpm knows to run rpmkeys for that switch)
It appears that it was introduced in 2010, and the functionality was removed from rpm in this commit:
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/commit/3cbda9c03f1feb872397f4afe75988b20746f403
and the man page was updated in this commit:
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/commit/c6d98322f1d30ca8028efb63bfde24b554abfda1
Thanks for this info. Definitely NOT something anyone would know about! :/
Regards,
Kay