Copying rpm's from one OS to another [closed]

Question

I am running sles10sp3 on two different vm's. I am trying to find the same rpm's as are installed on one of the vm's, so that I can install the same rpm's on the other vm. Is there any way to simply copy them from one vm to another (or in general copy all the .rpm's off SLES)? This has started with me trying to find a ruby 1.8.4 rpm and not having any luck, but there are a bunch of other rpm's I need to find as well.

Answer 1

Once a RPM package is installed, there is not enough information left on the system to reconstruct the RPM.

You can use "rpm -qa" to list all of the packages (and their versions) on each system, and you can "diff" those lists. But to actually install a specific version of a specific package, you will have to find (or search for) an actual copy of the actual RPM.

You can also use "rpm -ql " to enumerate the files associated with the RPM. But RPMs can also have pre-installation and post-installation scripts, so you cannot simply "tar up" the files and move them over.

In short I do not think there is any way to do what you want to do.

Also this is off-topic for StackOverflow. :-)