On Sun, Feb 25, amircea@libertysurf.fr wrote:
On my systems I use to have programs installed both from rpms (from SuSE distros or other) and by compilation from source. I also mix distributions, e.g. 6.3, 6.4, 7.0 and even 5.1 or 5.3 coexist more or less peacefully on my hard disks. Being such an indisciplined user implies that I have a recurrent problem: many times when I want to install a rpm package, it complains about the missing of such and such library. Often the library is there and is active and if I install the package using the --nodeps option it works well. So, I would very much like to know more about the mechanism used by the rpm program to find out if the dependencies are present on the system. From the 'man rpm' I could not find this information. How can I find it ? Thanks for your help.
Unfortunately RPM is not very well documented. RPM has to methods of
determining package dependencies. During the build process of a package, it
uses "ldd" on all binaries to determine all required shared libraries. It
can also automatically detect dependencenies on required script languages
like Perl or bash. In addtion to that, a package maintainer can add
additional dependencies on certain packages by adding them to the
"Requires:" field of the spec file. If you want to find out, what a package
requires, you can run "rpm -qRp