Anyone that’s ever worked in a mixed OS environment has surely encountered a time when they’ve needed to install rpm’s on AIX. Whether is was to get the latest GNU version of utilities for more flexible scripting, to support 3rd party monitoring tools, or because you’re developers were too lazy to properly compile installp bundles, we’ve almost all been there. It does, however, seem as if IBM added the rpm support and then has been on vacation ever since. The single most annoying limitation is the lack of dependency resolution. RPM “a” requires rpm’s “a-l” and each of those rpm’s require others, and it goes on and on and on. A simple port of YUM would be stupendous, but alas, we are left without. One man, Michael Perzl, of “http://www.perzl.org/” has graciously supported maintaining various rpm’s compiled for AIX and has even taken some great strides to setting up an infrastructure to support rpm dependency trees for AIX. Michael has setup the rpm distribution and has programmatically generated some dependency lists for those rpm’s. The last remaining step of the rpm dependency hell resolution is to have dependency lists for all rpm’s in the tree sorted and downloaded automatically. I think I’ve fixed the final piece with a script that recursively calls a function to build a list and download all unique rpm’s in the tree.. I’ve tested locally to much success, but as always, feel free to try it out and let me know if anything breaks. My tools are meant to be free, open, and a product of the larger Power community, so I’ve added this out to GitHub to make distribution easier.
Let me know if you have any questions or additions/corrections.
AIX RPM Dependency Script at GitHub
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