Created attachment 341955 [details] patch I generated detailing the one line change to pipe to sort Description of problem: Currently sosreport collected all installed rpms on a system and writes them to a file. This is (obviously) useful in a bunch of situations. I personally often find myself searching for a specific package to see if a customer has more than one of the same package installed. In the current collection of this file, sos basically collects rpm -qa output and pipes it to a file. This is fine...and it's easy enough to grep through the file for what I want, but I think a small improvement (with no negative impact I can find) would be to pipe this output to sort before writing it to a file so that when viewing the whole file in a text editor, packages of the same name will appear right next to each other in the list...as well as making it easier to navigate to the section of the file where you expect a specific rpm to exist. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): # rpm -q sos sos-1.7-9.16.el5 How reproducible: Easily and every time. Steps to Reproduce: 1. run sosreport and make sure the rpm plugin is executed 2. view installed-rpms (which is a symlink to sos_commands/rpm/rpm_-qa_--qf_NAME_-_VERSION_-_RELEASE_-_ARCH) 3. Actual results: File format is unsorted and random, based only on the order of packages that rpm -qa returns Expected results: This is more an RFE than a bug per se, so this behavior is expected right now. It's more a minor usability improvement that I think helps in certain situations. So in that regard, "expected" would be for this output to be sorted by package name. Additional info: I can't see any advantage to leaving the output of rpm -qa unsorted, mainly because I don't think there is any useful info that can be gleaned from it's ordering. If I'm missing something obviously useful here, let me know. Otherwise, the only negative impact I can see of this change is the brief fraction of a second it takes to pipe the output to the sort command in execution time.
Release note added. If any revisions are required, please set the "requires_release_notes" flag to "?" and edit the "Release Notes" field accordingly. All revisions will be proofread by the Engineering Content Services team. New Contents: As part of its report, sos lists the packages installed on the system. Previously, sos stored these in the order that they were provided by the rpm -qa command. Now, sos sorts the packages into alphabetical order as it compiles its list. Listing the packages alphabetically makes it easier to find packages visually, and groups some related packages together.
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on therefore solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2009-1418.html