Don Levey wrote:
What if... there were a way of going through the RPM database, creating a list, and presenting that to some sort of kickstart routine?
I actually did something similar last time I upgraded.
Before I upgraded, I ran rpm -qa --qf "%{name}.%{arch}\n" > packages
Afterwards, for i in `cat packages` ; do rpm -q $i ; done | grep "is not installed"\ | cut -d\ -f2 presented me with a list of packages that were not installed that I could have fed to yum.
I've never used kickstart (I've never had enough computers to upgrade at once to make it worthwhile), but I understand that I could have just given kickstart a list of those packages, now that you can enable other repos at install time.
(Of course, this wouldn't help with renamed packages, but the --qf option meant that "packages" didn't contain any version numbers, so the script didn't try to install old versions of existing packages.)
Hope this helps,
James.