[Yum-devel] Looking for help with a Yum plugin...

[James Antill]

On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 13:30 -0400, Douglas Kilpatrick wrote:
> I'm trying to write a plugin to make it easier to manage packages on a 
> host.  The basic idea is that each host has a per-host package that has 
> as it's requirements things I need the host to support.
> 
>    ie:
>    foo.oppositelock.org-1.0-<epoch seconds>.noarch.rpm
>       requires:
>           httpd
>           sendmail
>           bind
> 
> This part is done.  (per host packages generated automatically by rule, 
> added to a repository, etc)
> 
> The next part is to allow the per-host package to specify specific 
> versions, so that I can rollback a bad upgrade by pushing a new version 
> of the per-host package.
> 
>    foo.oppositelock.org-1.0-<epoch seconds>.noarch.rpm
>       requires:
>           httpd=httpd-2.2.3-22.el5
>           sendmail=sendmail-8.13.8-2.el5
>           bind

 Don't do this. In theory you could make it work well, with a
significant amount of work, but it's just doomed to reimplement things
people want that we've solutions for (and will likely continue to
improve).

 The way I'd recommend you do this atm. is to have two repos:

my-updates
my-updates-testing

...then run:

1. yum-debug-dump (from yum-utils)
2. yum update --enablerepo=my-updates-testing
3. <test ... whatever>
4a. If fine, move updates-testing data to updates.
4b. If a problem: yum-debug-restore <filename from #1>

...I'd also recommend that you do 1-4 on test boxes first, so the need
to do 4b on production machines is minimized.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora