[Yum] Bleeding edge avoidence

[Tim Forbes]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 08:27:14AM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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, yum actually helps you solve the issue. I hunted on the internet a bit
and deduced that it should be pretty easy to get going. On my FC5 box...

[root at tforbes-88 ~]# yum install yum-downloadonly
[root at tforbes-88 ~]# yum
Loading "downloadonly" plugin
etc

Disable the feature by editing the following file like this...
[root at tforbes-88 ~]# cat /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/downloadonly.conf
[main]
enabled=0



> 
> -- 
>   Les Mikesell
>    lesmikesell at gmail.com
> 
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-- 
timforbes(at)canada(dot)com
tforbes(at)greenbullfrog(dot)com
tf(at)greenbullfrog(dot)com