[Yum-devel] ready to help dev yum

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 17:43 -0700, mark_yum at tcu-inc.com wrote:
> Two things:
> 1. Develop yum. I see some things I would like in there, and I don't mind
> 	working on other things people want.
> 2. Develop a webpage interface to a yum server for computers to use.
>         I think everything should
> 	be in the repository for the client side program (yum) to work with.
>         If you configure the repositories and yum.conf correctly, there should
> 	be no need for there to be any communication (I think) beyond the
> 	normal http download. The simplier the better.
>         You might need some sort of database to keep track of computers, 
> 	groups, and accounts. 
>         Later, maybe, we can do an xmlrpc thing for super advanced stuff.
>         My goal is to knock out the RHN or to increase competition so that
> 	they don't pull their MS stunts with their licensing schemes. 
>         This will probably take a while. 

Ah, but of course. :) About a year and a half ago we have all banded
together (seth, mstenner, and me) and brainstormed about a way to make a
fine replacement for all functionality of RHN without introducing the
bad things that it carries with it. The end-result was the idea of a
project called "Redux," which is a distributed network of machines,
communicating over smpp (i.e. jabber), using a system of
cryptographically signed action sets. I've even wrote some basic code
for it, but then other tasks took priority, and I never managed to get a
non-proof-of-concept stuff out.

Redux is stuck in limbo, and with me likely going away to do more web
programming, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to get back to it. A shame,
really, as the idea is sound, and I'm downright proud of some code that
I wrote.

Let me know if you are interested in learning more about it. You can see
some of it here: http://linux.duke.edu/projects/redux/ though the page
was never completed or made public, and you can tell that by all the
references to "epylog" which is where I copied the page from. Viewcvs
can be accessed here:
http://devel.linux.duke.edu/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/redux/?cvsroot=redux

At the very least you can benefit from some code theft, if you find any
of it useful.

Let me know if you would like to find out more.

Regards,
-- 
Konstantin Ryabitsev <icon at linux.duke.edu>
Linux at DUKE