On 12/21/05, Panu Matilainen <pmatilai(a)laiskiainen.org> wrote:
Wil Cooley wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 16:51 -0500, seth vidal wrote:
>
>
>>>The problem with any of these are that long package names gets mangled
>>>in the yum output and i haven't found a place to tweak that.
>>>
>>
>>an EXCELLENT reason to never rely on screenscraping.
>
>
> A tool not designed to be connected with other tools? Sounds like a
> disregard for one of the best UNIX design principles, to me.
Yum is more of an interactive program than a tool designed to be piped
into something else - users want a nicely formatted output where the
update is coming from, progress bars and such, all of which pretty much
conflicts with piping to other programs (hence the "screen scraping" term).
Just because yum is interactive doesn't mean it shouldn't handle
screen wrapping properly. Notice how `ls` (at least on my system)
shows the results in columns with colours, but when you pipe it, it
automatically outputs as a list without colours. I think this is to do
with detecting the usage of /dev/tty or something (I can't remember).
If python is not capable of doing that kind of thing I would be
surprised.
n0dalus.