[Yum] RFE near term items

[R P Herrold]

Hope all the ice avoids you, and that you are safely at a
friendly coffee house with no charge 802.11b access, Seth
<smile>

Couple of thoughts, looking both back and forward (these are 
sort of compound thoughts ...):

1. I am banging on yum pretty hard (Report: It can be built 
back on RHL 6.1 with some backporting, but I have not yet set 
a 6.1 update mirror to test against).

I understand that RHL 8.0 shows a conditional need (ruling 
out a fixed install time dependency, wihch would mess up RHL 
7.x series hosts) for:
   librpm404 and rpm404-python
under my belt.  In looking at 
   clientStuff.py, depchecktree.py, nevral.py, 
	pkgaction.py and pullheaders.py 
Is it possible to more gracefully catch when either one of the
two are missing than returning a traceback?


2. Thinking about archives, in building distributed update 
mirrors for scaling, it would be a goodness to avoid having to 
edit  /etc/yum.conf  on a host to set the RH version to 
    7.3, 8.0, and presumeably 8.1 
in due course.  The hope would be to have a stock local 
yum-xx.noarch.rpm variant with a  pre-configured  generic 
/etc/yum.conf 

How about setting a couple of environmental variables of the 
eval:
   RHV     rpm -q --qf '%{version}\n' redhat-release
called perhaps RHR, along with:
   arch    rpm -q --qf '%{arch}\n' glibc-common
   vendor  rpm -q --qf '%{version}\n' redhat-release | \
		awk -f"-" {'print $1'}
[I key on glibc-common, as it seems the fixed item to avoid
the snakepit of variants in 'kernel' and 'glibc' parent]

so a self-configuring ad hoc self-installing and balancing 
approach could exist:

   [base]
name=Red Hat Linux $RHV base
baseurl=http://mirror.domain.com/pub/yum-repository/$vendor/$RHV/$arch/

And then the mirror galaxy maintainer's job is to keep a 
master
   mirror.domain.com
with 
   /pub/yum-repository/$vendor/$RHV/$arch/
which in turn can be scaled with the conventional DNS aliasing 
as a CNAME pointing to an array of
   mirror.us1.domain.com
   mirror.us2.domain.com
   mirror.au.domain.com

-- Russ Herrold