rpm-python difficulty

Wednesday, September 14. 2005

rpm-python difficulty

I spent my evening discovering the lack of documentatoin the python rpm bindings have. I read the article The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security and started thinking about a point made in #2

Examine a typical antivirus package and you'll see it knows about 75,000+ viruses that might infect your machine. Compare that to the legitimate 30 or so apps that I've installed on my machine, and you can see it's rather dumb to try to track 75,000 pieces of Badness when even a simpleton could track 30 pieces of Goodness.

RPM already knows about all the "Goodness" on my system, so the idea is that anything not in places like /home, /tmp, /var or /usr/local wasn't put there by me.

I have no idea where I will go with this, or even if I'll do anything, but it struck me as useful if I could easily constuct a list of things that the RPM database doesn't know about, or things that don't have the permissions or content RPM thinks they should have. I'm aware of the "rpm -V" command, but that's not very extendable, and it doesn't tell me of files that aren't in the RPM database.

On the topic of the python rpm bindings ...
I had a terrible time figuring them out. Luckily I found enough from reading yum source and trial and error, I think I know what I need to know now.

Posted by Josh Bressers at 11:30 | Comments (2) | Trackback (1)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Crufty
I mentioned in an earlier post that I was working on a cruft finding tool for an RPM system. Mark asked me about it today, and I remembered that I had things in order, I just had to roll it up into something pretty. I'm calling it "crufty" for lack of

Weblog: Josh's Blog
Tracked: Oct 13, 18:52

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Debian has a tool called "cruft" to find files that are not in dpkg's database.

Description: Find any cruft built up on your system
cruft is a program to look over your system for anything that shouldn't
be there, but is; or for anything that should be there, but isn't.
.
It bases most of its results on dpkg's database, as well as a list of
`extra files' that can appear during the lifetime of various packages.
.
cruft is still in pre-release; your assistance in improving its accuracy
and performance is appreciated.

#1 Malcolm Parsons (Homepage) on 2005-09-14 14:44 (Reply)

I had been thinking of a similar idea for a different reason: efficient backups. The idea is to back up only the files that are not from an RPM or .deb that is in the current yum/apt database, together with the list of installed packages (--get-selections, for Debian folk), so that the minimal number of files are saved to restore the system (this assumes that, after restoration, we would do apt-get update or yum update in any case).

#2 Joe Buck on 2005-09-14 23:01 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: BBCode format allowed
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry