Solving dependencies with rpm

Working with package dependencies on Red Hat Linux

Objective

Our goal is to get used to the tools available to find out information about package dependencies on an RPM based system.

Operating System and Software Versions

  • Operating system: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5
  • Software: rpm 4.11, yum 3.4.3

Requirements

Privileged access to the system.

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

  • # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
  • $ – given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Introduction

RPM, which stands for Red Hat Package Manager, is a well-known and mature package manager used by all Red Hat flavor distributions, as well as SuSE. With RPM the packager can define relations between packages, and even with versions of packages – for example, an Apache Tomcat server needs proper Java environment present to be able to run.

On the other hand, to install a Java environment, you don’t need a Tomcat server – you may decide to run some different Java based application, maybe one written by yourself started by hand when needed to do it’s job. In other words, the Tomcat server depends on Java.

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