Redhat Updates: Best Strategy?

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 02:55:33PM -0500, Matthew J. Brodeur wrote:
>    The command I would use to update a 7.2 system, given a complete
> updates mirror, is:
> [7.2/en/os/i386]# rpm -Fvh `ls *.rpm | egrep -v \
>  '(^kernel-2.4.9|^glibc-2.2.4)'` ../i686/kernel-2.4.9-13.i686.rpm \
> ../i686/glibc-2.2.4-19.i686.rpm ../noarch/*.rpm
> 
>    That's a lot to type, 

That's what copy and paste are for.

> and I'm sure there's a better way, but it works.

And it is looking close to what I want, thanks!  A trio more
questions, if I may:

1. I am running Red Hat 7.0 with a bunch of previous updates,
   including rpm 4.0.2.  Does that do anything to the parameters of
   the egrep and the rest?  Or do I want all those same revs anyway?

2. What if I have a boo-boo, how do I back out such an update?  Does
   rpm have any snapshot feature?  Or do I just figure out how to fix
   the results if something isn't happy?

3. Why is rpm so opaque?  If I really suffer I can always dig what I
   want out of the man page, but I want to get good it slinging it
   around before I break something.  Is there a good document for it?
   A decent cheatsheet?  Both??


Thanks a bunch,

-kb, the Kent who will be breaking, er, updating, his server this
weekend.