yum: Identifying Packages where Installed version-release is Newer than Repo version-release

I manage my RHEL 6 / 7 systems with yum pointed at a local repository that is a replica of the official repository from Red Hat.

Other people have installed newer versions of some packages as follows:

rpm -i <package name>-<newer version>-<release number of newer version>.rpm

I would rather they'd give me the .rpm because then I could put it in my repo, run createrepo to rebuild the repo with the newer package version, and then update the package as follows:

yum update <package name>

How may I identify installed packages for which the installed package version-release is newer than the version-release in my repo?

Note that this is the opposite of yum update, which identifies installed packages for which the installed package version-release is older than the version-release in my repo.

1 Answer

I think that other than scripting it there's no easy way.

Scripting implies that you grab a list of all installed packages via rpm -qa then fetch what their latest version is from the repository, using repoquery. And compare whether the latter versions are older than the former ones.

To speed this up a bit, you may act upon only packages that appear to be installed other than from repos. So as opposed to comparing versions for all pkgs from rpm -qa, you will use a list from:

yum list installed | grep @/

... which will get the list of packages installed via yum install /path/to/some.rpm

and:

yum list installed | grep installed

... will get the list of packages installed via rpm -i /path/to/rpm