RPMAutoUpdate
RPMAutoUpdate is a tool to easily identify which rpm packages, given a large pool of potential files, actually provide updates relevant to packages installed on your system.
This is purely a command-line driven tool for reporting and easily installing relevant updates. This is probably a good one for sysadmins with no XFree86 on their GNU/Linux box, or no subscription to something like RedHat's RHN service. It allows you to (for example) mirror the 'updates' directory from RedHat or similar onto a machine and then run this program over it to pick out and install only the rpm's that provide newer versions of programs already on your system. RedHat have a graphical tool that does this, and a command-line version of the same, but it's tied to (as far as I can tell, anyway) their RHN service. I haven't investigated it or used any of their code, this program is purely a clever and powerful wrapper around all of the basic functionality of the rpm command itself. I know of two other projects that relate to this, one is a free replacement server for RedHat's RHN server, which you can get called NRH-up2date. Also, there is another excellent command-line tool available that I found after releasing version 1.0 of rpmautoupdate called autoRPM. AutoRPM is a very flexible and fast tool, but does not have the same reporting capabilities, nor the same powerful version matching engine and exactitude for finding updates that RPMAutoUpdate does.
The project page is available for downloading and forums.
As always, I welcome any patches, comments, suggestions, etc...
Latest version is now 1.3.2. This is a stable release featuring all of the speedups introduced in 1.3.0 and 1.3.1 as well as some additional minor enhancements to keep almost all of the program code perpetually 'compiled' for the end-user. Additionally, significant commenting has been added to various areas of the code to improve comprehension for anyone reviewing it. Next on the roadmap is better handling for 'problem' rpm files..
Contact me
Feel free to donate some spare change to the development of RPMAutoUpdate