[Rpm-metadata] Newbie/Neophyte

[Jesse Keating]

On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 14:14 -0500, Jon Wallace wrote:
> 
> 1) What is .discinfo and where can I find a description of each 
> key/value pair

.discinfo is used by Anaconda mostly.  I don't know if there is any
documentation that fully describes each key/value.  Discussion at
anaconda-devel-list at redhat.com

> 2) What is .treeinfo and where can I find a description of entries in 
> it, as well as a description of how it functions.

.treeinfo is used by things that interact with Fedora/RH style trees.
QA tools, virt-install tools, etc..  The content should be fairly self
explanatory, but again it's not documented.  Currently there is code in
my tool, pungi, which creates the files while the trees are being
composed. buildsys-list at redhat.com is likely the best email list for
pungi

> 3) If I want to build something with multiple DVD's, how does anaconda 
> know when to call for "the other disk media"?

Split media sets have a slightly different yum repodata in them,
repodata that references which media # of a set the package lives on.
This tells consumers, such as anaconda, when to prompt the user to
switch media.  anaconda-devel-list at redhat.com again.

> 4) Lot of talk on Internet about comps.xml, but in RHEL I see 
> comps-rhel5-server-core.xml  and there is no comps.xml shipped.

The xml file name doesn't really matter.  A reference to the file is
embedded in the yum repodata at createrepo time, and consumers of the
metadata will download and process whatever it's called.  The term
"comps" doesn't even have to be in the name, and is just a historical
name and practice.  There is no "governing body" over comps.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (http://jkeating.livejournal.com)
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