Bug 149017

I know you want a cli switch but:

   use RPM2;

   my $db = RPM2->open_rpm_db();

   $i = $db->find_by_name_iter("kernel");
   @kernels = $i->expand_iter();
   @kernels = sort(@kernels);
   foreach my $p (@kernels) {
       print $p->as_nvre() . "\n";
   }
   exit(0);

Will do the trick.  Its a tiny perl script using RPM2 (perl rpm bindings).  
Its only an example to give you an idea of what you can do.

This:

@kernels = sort(@kernels);

will do a proper RPM version sort, not just alphanumeric?  There is no idication
in the perl RPM2 documentation that it overrides sort or provides RPM version
sorting.

I've been using the perl module RPM::VersionSort for this kind of thing but I
was hoping to avoid perl scripts and modules and have:

lastestkernel=`rpm -q kernel --version-sorted | tail -1`

Your right its not documented, but the <=> operator is overloaded to properly
compare EVR's (I know its overloaded because I added that patch (-:).  So yes it
will do what you want (in perl).  The docs in RPM2 could be greatly expanded.

Cheers...james

rpmquery cannot possibly include enough options to satisfy
every possible need and taste.

Extract the information and sort to taste.