During an install of Fedora, the user is shown package descriptions whilst rpms are installed. Once the system is setup however, there is no obvious way - from the command line, and with up2date - to query this list of packages in all repositories a user has to find the name of the package needed. For example, I would like to install the snmpwalk program. Ideally: # update --search snmpwalk Package name: net-snmp-utils The reality (two choices). 1. The easier way: play guess the path and use up2date --whatprovides /usr/bin/snmpwalk 2. Spend time Googling. Both of these ways are slower than the "update --search" option. I realise the rpmdb-fedora package will address the "not sure which package solves a dependency" problem, but the documentation that comes with it seems missing.
theres a couple things that are close to this that you may find useful: 1. glob support up2date "foo*" 2. comps support up2date "@Gnome Workstation" 3. up2date --show-available This lists all the packages available that are not currently installed. 4. up2date --show-package-dialog If using the gui, this will show an additional package selection screen, showing all the packages that are not currently installed.
Here's a good one: try and find the uudecode binary using up2date.
Moving to yum.
# yum provides uudecode is the answer. Thanks seth! btw. I noticed that multiple runs of yum provides uudecode re-read the package lists each time. Should a second run not act as if -C had been given?
no b/c you can't tell if metadata has been updated the second time. you have to check something, at least.