[Rpm-metadata] repository isolation

[Jon Wallace]

On 01/20/2011 11:52 AM, seth vidal wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 11:00 -0500, Jon Wallace wrote:
>    
>> Hello,
>>
>> Are repositories isolated entities?  I'm trying to determine if there is
>> any way that createrepo allows dependencies at the repository level.  In
>> other words, using Repository-B would have a dependency on the existance
>> of Repository-A and the content of Repository-A would be available as well.
>>
>>      
> To twist this around - what's the problem with having RepoA and RepoB
> available? Why do you need B to pull in A? Why not just have them both
> enabled? OR is this a case of wanting an infinite set of interdependent
> repos and wanting them to be enabled dynamically based on what repos are
> explicitly enabled?
>
> If so - then this is not really something that createrepo can do - it
> has to be handled in the pkg manager using the repodata: smart, yum,
> zypper, etc.
>
>
> It might be worth describing the actual use case you're interested in -
> including the scale of the repos (how many, how interdependent, how
> complex) and maybe we can come up with a solution.
>
> I can think of a few ways off the top of my head using yum plugins.
>
> -sv
>    

The intent is to understand limitations at a repository level and 
whether we can think of the repository as part of a "bundle".  So one 
example might be that you have one repository called PRODUCT_A and 
another repository called PRODUCT_B.  Now for customer purposes you 
might create three "bundles".  One would be PRODUCT_A by itself, another 
would be PRODUCT_B by itself, and you might have another bundle called 
"EVERYTHING" which would provide you software from both PRODUCT_A and 
PRODUCT_B.

A different example would be trying to limit the size of repositories 
that have similar packages.  So if PRODUCT_A and PRODUCT_B both need the 
same rpm package (xyz.rpm) it would be nice if the physical rpm file 
only had to live in one place and could be referenced from any other 
number of repositories, similar to how symbolic links work.

Jon