Given an rpm package name, query the yum database for updates

Question

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 do this?

Answer 1

http://fpaste.org/paste/2453

and there are many examples of the yum api and some guides to getting started with it here:

http://yum.baseurl.org/#DeveloperDocumentationExamples

Answer 2

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