[Yum] files like parameter to YUM

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:43 AM, James Antill <james-yum at and.org> wrote:
>
>>>  There's yum-debug-dump and yum-debug-restore. You may also want to
>>> look at yum history.
>>
>> Is that a reasonable (or the best) way to reproduce the running
>> package set on a different machine?    Could you use it to do
>> 'reproducible updates" to match a tested set even if newer packages
>> had been introduced to the repositories?
>
>  Yes, you can use it to do that ... however there is an easier way
> specifically designed for that case. If you have two machines (say
> "prod" and "test") that are in state FOO, and you update "test" to BAR
> and then want to update "prod" to the exact same thing the easiest
> thing to do is use the "yum transaction file" from history.
>
>  Eg.
>
> # test
> yum -q history addon-info last saved_tx > my-BAR-update.yumtx
> # prod
> yum load-transaction my-BAR-update.yumtx
>
> ...this does a number of checks, including making sure that both
> machines were indeed in the same initial state.

But what if they aren't?  Normally I'd want to reproduce the tested
state across production whether they were previously in lock-step sync
or not.  And I've always been surprised (maybe shocked) that being
able to do this wasn't simple to do with yum which otherwise looks
like it was designed to manage the packages on a machine.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com