Bug 863894

Summary:	RPM man page doesn't adequately or even at all describe rpmnew and rpmsave and the circumstances under which they are created
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Georgiy Treyvus <georgiytreyvus>
Component:	rpm	Assignee:	Fedora Packaging Toolset Team <packaging-team>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	rawhide	CC:	ffesti, jzeleny, packaging-team, pknirsch
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2014-04-02 12:10:16 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Georgiy Treyvus 2012-10-08 01:12:18 UTC

Description of problem:

Though one would have to be quite dense to not guess approximately what .rpmnew and .rpmsave files are and the circumstances under which they are created by package management operations sometimes one is interested in the more exact details of this process to be sure their guess was right.

I was cleaning up my system earlier today and I wanted more information. I look in the rpm man page where information about this or at least a pointer thereto should be and found nothing of the sort. Not even a basic explanation of what .rpmnew and .rpmsave files are and how they're generated by package management operations. At the very least that should be in the man page but it wasn't.

I looked in other places on my system such as /usr/share/doc as well but nothing enlightening.

I then hit the web and found what I needed but this was information from people who used common sense guesses and trial and error. Users of a technology especially one so important it's in the LSB should not have to guess about the technology's behaviour. They should be able to look it up in an obvious place and know.

More frustratingly yet this information is not even on rpm.org except in a very implicit indirect form scattered over random back corners. Please fix this documentation error.



Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
This is a problem with all versions of RPM

Comment 1 Fedora End Of Life 2013-04-03 16:57:53 UTC

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 19 development cycle.
Changing version to '19'.

(As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 19 development
cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 19 End Of Life. Thank you.)

More information and reason for this action is here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora19

Comment 2 Florian Festi 2014-04-02 12:10:16 UTC

http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ch-rpm-upgrade.html describes the behaviour in question. Yes, Maximum RPM is outdated but it is still one of the best source available (beside the packaging guidelines)

Comment 3 Georgiy Treyvus 2014-04-02 15:43:56 UTC

Still the documentation should be in a more obvious place like the man page and also should be kept up to date. I hate to praise BSD but this is one thing they do right. Bottom line is a piece of software is much less useful, sometimes entirely useless if we don't know how to operate it. And we can't know how to operate it without proper documentation.