[Yum] Bleeding edge avoidence

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2006-09-01 at 01:06, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> >
> >> Reproducing an installation starts to approach a valid reason :) However
> >> build and file time stamps are not reliable way of doing this, nothing
> >> guarantees that packages arrive in a given repository in the order they
> >> are built: for example the vendor might have a heavier testing programme
> >> for the kernel than some minor package, causing kernel to arrive in the
> >> repo much later than some other package despite having an older timestamp.
> >>
> >> If you want reproducable installations, use versionlock (plugin
> >> available in yum-utils) on the packageset you tested and forget about
> >> timestamps.
> >
> > Is there documentation available for the various plugins and how
> > to use them together?  For example, given a tested system, how
> > would you tell a box in a different location to update/install
> > to the same packages and versions?
> 
> You can set the versionlock file to be somewhere remote, eg 
> locklist=http://my.main.server.com/versionlock/distro/$releasever or 
> similar. Then you just control that one file, all yum update/install 
> operations will use the versions specified there no matter what other 
> versions are available.

I hate to sound dense, but I don't see how that follows the
tested system.  Can you give a complete example or point to
more detailed documentation?  The scenario is that one machine
is used for testing and once it is approved, the same set
of packages should be updated on a group of remote machines
in different locations.  However, one or a few RPM packages will
be local system config files that are tied to the machine
location and should not be identical everywhere.

> > Also, now that the download-only option has been moved out of yum 
> > itself, how do you tell it to pre-fetch the packages you are going to 
> > need (either for this or a normal 'update'), so as to be able to plan 
> > the timing of the actual package installation/updates in a way not tied 
> > to internet bandwidth or health of remote repositories?
> 
> One way to do "download only" with current yum itself is to set 
> tsflags=test in yum.conf, that way it'll just perform a transaction test 
> but not actually do anything to the system. Or you can write a five-line 
> plugin to make it stop once download completes.

Again, how is someone supposed to know how to do this?  Do you
now have to know python to interact with yum beyond the default
'I hope the repository is OK' mode?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com