[Yum-devel] requested 'protectbase', as used in yum 2.0

[David L. Parsley]

Hi all,

I thought it best to explain the current usage of the protectbase patch
- both to support the patch (which I coded for 2.0), and to get feedback
on a possible better solution to the problem the patch addresses.

With the relatively recent influx of free clones of 'enterprise' Linux
OS's, I find this is fairly common:
- Users want to stick to the core, supported OS as much as possible
- The core OS, however, lacks a large number of commonly used packages

So, on many of my enterprise boxes, I'd like to add - most commonly -
the Dag Wieers repository, and just yum install the stuff I want from
there.  Problem is, if I just add the Dag repo, a number of his packages
will update the 'supported' versions on the next yum update.

So, in the first cut of the patch, packages from 'protected'
repositories would never be updated by packages from non-protected
repos, acting in similar fashion to a dynamic 'excludes' on all repos
not marked as 'base'.  That alone worked pretty well.

Then, on some occasions, I wanted to selectively upgrade packages from
3rd party repos; say, lftp.  I added a cli flag to turn off protectbase
for a single yum command.  But, I also had to pay attention to the local
rpmdb, and when a pkg Vendor != the dist Vendor, the package became
'unprotected' so it could continue to update from non-base repos.

The first part is fairly straightforward.  The second part isn't as
pretty.  I'm thinking it might be better to have something like a
per-repo:
unprotect = lftp ...

Which the admin would manually modify for those 'corner case' packages. 
More thoughts on this are welcome. (desired even)

regards,
	David
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.baseurl.org/pipermail/yum-devel/attachments/20050304/ef763c15/attachment.pgp