[Yum] Patches hosted on YUM repository

Amit Laxmikant Pande pamitlaxmikant at novell.com
Fri Sep 5 06:43:50 UTC 2008


Not sure if already  this item is on the "TO DO" list. 

The use case: 

For all the Linux patches, hosted on YUM repositories, I would like to see only security patches and then I can decide if I wish to mirror them. 

Current solution: 

For YUM repositories, we have patches.xml which maintains few details about all the patches hosted on that particular repository and then links to the individual patch-XXXX.xml files. 

Some sample patches.xml file: 

http://download.opensuse.org/update/10.3-test/repodata/patches.xml 

So if I just want to see security patches, I need to  go through the parent patches.xml file and then through all the individual patch files. 
Since we need to parse all the patch files (there may be few hundreds of patches hosted on a YUM repository on an average), the listing becomes tremendously slow and giving a not so pleasant user experience. 

And the use case of someone (mainly the administrator managing IT infrastructure of any organization ) willing to see only certain type of updates is pretty widely used. 


Suggestion: 

Can we move (or copy,for that matter) this patch category (security, recommended, optional) information in the patches.xml only so that by parsing just one XML file I can get what I want within a quick time ? 


Is there any subtle reason for not doing this so far ? 
Any feedback on the same is welcome. 


Thanks, 
Amit 


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