[Yum] Bleeding edge avoidence

[Johnny Hughes]

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 14:37 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 00:20, Panu Matilainen wrote:

<snip>

> A couple of other questions now: can I expect
> the versionlock to work 'backwards'?  That is, if the testing
> turned out to be optimistic, could I back down to the previous
> packages by using the list from the prior CVS commit (assuming
> the repositories still held the old files, of course)?

I would think it would have a problem with this, as it would need to
remove the newer package and install the older one (at least I can't
easily make yum replace a newer pacakge with an older one).  So, I don't
know if the plugin would do that.

Things like this would also require all RPMS to be in the repo and
maintained forever.

In the case of CentOS, we don't do that due to size considerations ...
and only the newest snapshot is maintained on all public mirrors.

So, you would need to also need include the vault server in repos to see
older packages (or maintain your own repo with all the files you would
like to choose from).

You mentioned C3, where there are no yum plugins as well.

We are working on a yum-2.4.x for centos3 ... however it is not ready
yet.

> > >> 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?

Yes, if you don't want to use the provided functionality and want to
extend it by writing new functionality then you need to do so in the
language required (which is python).  Of course, you can also use bash
scripting, perl, ruby, C, or any other programming method you want to
interact with the yum program.

> > 
> > As was pointed out by Seth, such a plugin has been already written while I 
> > wasn't looking :)
> 
> And it even seems to be in the fedora FC5 disto or extras, but
> not documented on the wiki or anywhere else I can find. It is
> an important option when you need to schedule the times that
> changes will be made with some degree of precision.

Also ... there is a version of tsflags and versionlock for yum in CentOS
(yum-utils) ... what docs exist are in /usr/share/doc/yum-
utils-0.5/plugins/. There is not a version of download only that I can
find.

The newer versions of yum-utils (> 0.5) are written with python 2.4 (or
newer) and not python 2.3 (that is in CentOS-4) ... therefore have not
been tested on CentOS-4.  That is why they are not included.

If people want to develop these for CentOS-4, we are surely willing to
accept them for inclusion in our repositories, after they have been
tested.

Thanks,
Johnny Hughes
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