[Yum-devel] [RFC] hardware specific repo + disable repo if 404

[seth vidal]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 17:01 -0500, Michael E Brown wrote:
> All,
>     I am looking for feedback on the code below. Thanks.
> 
>     I am writing a yum plugin that will set up a hardware-specific yum
> repo. Basically, this is just a repo with a baseurl or mirrorlist like
> this: 
>     baseurl=http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/system-$dellsysid
> 
>     The problem I have is that I will not have a repo for each and every
> Dell system ever made... some system ids will come back as http 404.
> This is not an error in this case because everything is just fine. But,
> yum considers this an error and will not continue.
> 
>     My proposed solution to this is to have the following option in the
> *.repo file:
>     disable_if_404={1,0}
> 
>     Then, in my plugin, I wrap the _loadRepoXML() method and call
> .disable() if it throws an exception. The current code is below.
> Everything appears to work just fine with one minor output detail that I
> want to fix.
> 
> 1) Does anybody have any objections to doing it this way? Is this the
> best way to do this?
> 
> 2) How do I supress the urlgrabber error output? I still get the
> following error output even though everything appears to complete
> successfully:
> 

How would the use distinguish  b/t this repo doesn't exist and the site
is down? How would yum? Why is having it return a 404 and not just an
empty repo better?

the url above could easily be a cgi with a redirect in it. If your
systemid has a repo, it sends you there, if not it sends you to an empty
repo.

-sv