Abstract rpm and deb into modules separate from apt and yum

[techhat]

This surface with issue #3444, wherein ALT Linux uses a combination of apt + rpm for package management. ALT is ultimately in the RedHat family (RedHat -> Mandrake -> ALT), but it split off before yum started being used in RedHat systems.

The big problem is that apt.py will not work with rpm files, because it has several pieces of functionality that are hardcoded to use dpkg (example: list_pkgs()).

SUSE also uses rpm files, but it uses zypper instead of yum. A quick look shows that zypper.py and yumpkg.py both have a list_pkgs() function, which seem to do the same thing, but with different code. Presumably, they could be abstracted into the same function in an rpm.py package.

Tagging @Archtaku, @valintinr, @s0undt3ch. This situation should be approached with care.

[terminalmage]

yumpkg.py uses a python interface for the rpmdb. It could just as easily use (and has done so in the past) the output from rpm -qa to list packages.

So, it seems to me that for RPM, the best solution is to break out the code from zypper's list_pkgs (as it would also work for yumpkg and yumpkg5) into an rpm.py module. The list_pkgs function for zypper, yumpkg, and yumpkg5 would then basically be the following:

def list_pkgs():
    return __salt__['rpm.list_pkgs']()

For DEB, I assume the same could be done.

[UtahDave]

I'm putting this on the Modules to Write milestone.

[techhat]

You mean like...

https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/salt/modules/rpm.py
https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/develop/salt/modules/dpkg.py

We just need to break out the rest of the functionality.

[UtahDave]

We can reopen if someone is going to tackle this.