[Yum] Documentation Questions and Updates

[Gerhardus Geldenhuis]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:46 PM, James Antill <james-yum at and.org> wrote:
> Gerhardus Geldenhuis <gerhardus.geldenhuis at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Alternatively if you are using Redhat 5.4/Centos 5.4 or another OS
>> that does not yet have the latest yum available, then the plugin must
>> be obtained manually from the current git repository for yum which is
>> http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb.
>
>  The latest version, sure. But you can get an older version with the
> older name "yum install yum-versionlock".
>
> [...]
>
>> The plugin will only work for yum versions 2.3.3 and later
>
>  I'm not sure anyone uses anything older than 2.4.x anymore.
>
> [...]
>
>  Apart from those minor bits it looks great.
>
> --

This started out to be a "quick" update, but I will rather do it well
:-) I do hope I have covered all bases now, thanks for your patience
and feedback.

The man page for yum-versionlock(latest release) does not specify the
format of the versionlock.list file, it is specified in the README
file but I believe it makes more sense to live in the man page.
I will modify this and send a diff to the list a bit later. I don't do
this often so would appreciate if you could let me know with which
flags you want the diff run with.

I have removed any reference to minimum versions and re-arranged the
text slightly:

Q4. second bullet
Another way to pin package "foo" to a certain version is to use the
versionlock plugin.

If you are using the latest Fedora (12) then the plugin can be
installed using yum install yum-plugin-versionlock

To add files that you want version locked, use the following yum command:
yum versionlock <package-name>
you can also use wildcards
yum versionlock <package-name>-*

The config file uses the following format:
EPOCH:NAME-VERSION-RELEASE.ARCH which can be obtained using:
rpm -q <package name> --queryformat "%{EPOCH}:%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}\n "

If no EPOCH is specified in the package, then the number will be 0.

Alternatively if you are using Redhat 5.4/Centos 5.4 or another OS
that does not yet have the latest yum available you can use yum
install yum-versionlock. This version of the plug-in does not extend
flags that you can pass to yum and the lock list must be edited
manually.

For a manual install the source can be obtained from the current git
repository for yum which is
http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb.
The files you need will be found in the yum-utils/plugins/versionlock
part of the git tree.
Copy versionlock.py   to /usr/lib/yum-plugins/versionlock.py
Copy versionlock.conf to /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/versionlock.conf
Create /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/versionlock.list
All files should be root.root with 644 permissions.

Regards

-- 
Gerhardus Geldenhuis