How to find a Fedora package providing a dependency I need?

Question

I sometimes install software which isn't present in the repositories, and then I run into the problem of not satisfied dependencies. The error usually tells me which library or command is missing. Then I run a yum search. If there is a package name coinciding with the library/command name needed, it is easy.

The problem comes when I can't find anything in yum. I start searching around on the Web, and often I find links to the library. But I don't know whether to trust these sites, where to copy the library if I download it, what it is supposed to do at all, and so on. Often it is supposed to be for another distribution, or another Fedora version, and then I don't know whether they will work with mine. I suspect that these libraries are probably present in some package already in the repository, and I would much rather have them from there than from random Googled sites.

How can I find out which package a library belongs to, if I have its name? For example, now I need the library libpng12.so.0, how do I get it? And if it is not a library, but a command, how do I find the package which provides it?

Solution 1

Since libraries are "autoprovided" by rpmbuild:

yum whatprovides libpng12.so.0

If that results in nothing then no package in Fedora provides it and you'll need to talk to whoever built the software.

Solution 2

If you want to satisfy the dependencies then you can search the application that you want in the synaptic manager and then check it and install it. Or if you like to save your performance and do it on command-line then use :

sudo yum "package1" "dependency1" "dependency2" ...

Replace the text in quotes with the package name or the dependency.

Comments

[rumtscho]

The software I am installing is not in the repositories at all, so the repository doesn't know which dependencies it needs.

[Alan Wills -MSFT]

@Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams : fedora has synaptic. You can install it by : "sudo yum synaptic" . without quotes.

[Alan Wills -MSFT]

@rumtscho : You can add a repository to your system so that it can obtain dependencies or packages from that link.

[rumtscho]

First, I don't want to add too many repositories beside the official ones. Second, I am not aware of any repositories containing the programms I am installing. Their authors offer them as binaries only.

[drs]

Any package found in http://archive.fedoraproject.org would be able to be installed via yum (so long as it's available for your version of Fedora), so there's no need to search the site and download it manually.