[Yum-devel] [PATCH] Alternative specification of 'installonlypkgs'. BZ 748054

James Antill james at fedoraproject.org
Wed Dec 14 16:30:25 UTC 2011


On Tue, 2011-12-13 at 08:07 +0100, Zdeněk Pavlas wrote:
> Include 'glob:/etc/yum/installonly.d/*.conf' in the default
> installonlypkgs option so it's possible to extend the list
> without copy-pasting the list of kernel packages.
> 
> Also, provide an optional syntax to specify the per-package
> installonly_limit and honour it in _limit_installonly_pkgs.

 For anyone who hasn't looked at the bug, the problem is that people
want to start shipping VMs as rpms ... and they are _kind of_ like
kernels in many respects.

 The problems with just reuse installonlypkgs are (IMO):

1. The configuration could just as easily be called "installkernelpkgs"
atm. ... and these new things won't be exactly like kernels.

2. Adding this exception is almost guaranteed to make people think they
should abuse this for other random things, which will be even more
dissimilar to kernels.

3. Due to historical mess the configuration is a list of package
provides ... so adding more things is more expensive as we need to
search 150k of provides instead of just 24k of package names.

4. We want to do something like the kernel removal protection (don't
remove things that are "running"), which means we'd need extra
configuration anyway (to find out which VMs are in use).

...but the patch itself does what the BZ asked for, and isn't
horrible¹ ... so if nobody can think of a better solution, or is willing
to try one, meh. But it sure feels like a big hack we'll have to live
with forever, against something else that is "VM specific".

 Any other opinions?


¹ Having installonlypkgs_limit as an external API in the conf. object
seems bad. And the foo:N things is a giant hack (esp. when you consider
that provides can have : in them).



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