Given An Rpm Package Name, Query The Yum Database For Updates

I was imagining a 3-line Python script to do this but the yum Python API is impenetrable. Is this even possible? Is writing a wrapper for 'yum list package-name' the only way to d

Solution 1:

As Seth points out, you can use the updates APIs to ask if something is available as an update. For something that's close to what the "yum list" does you probably want to use the doPackageLists(). Eg.

import os, sys
import yum

yb = yum.YumBase()
yb.conf.cache = os.geteuid() != 1
pl = yb.doPackageLists(patterns=sys.argv[1:])
if pl.installed:
    print "Installed Packages"
    for pkg in sorted(pl.installed):
        print pkg
if pl.available:
    print "Available Packages"
    for pkg in sorted(pl.available):
        print pkg, pkg.repo
if pl.reinstall_available:
    print "Re-install Available Packages"
    for pkg in sorted(pl.reinstall_available):
        print pkg, pkg.repo