[Yum-devel] yum-utils, support for @group syntax

[Jason Parker]

I recently had a need to be able to download a set of packages/groups to create
a fairly minimal distro ISO (CentOS, Fedora, etc).  I started out using pungi to
download RPMs, which was great, but very much overkill for what I needed.  While
it certainly worked well, I had to remove quite a lot from it to make it work on
my Debian box.

I decided that it would be better for me to use something that required a very
minimal amount of changes.  yumdownloader was *almost* perfect for what I
needed, except that it doesn't support groups.  Well...didn't.  After a bit of
hacking and pretending I know python, I managed to come up with something that
appears to work.  My patch basically allows you to do something like
`yumdownloader --resolve @core @base ntp` which will turn the core and base
groups into a list of packages to download.

With me not knowing python at all, I'm sure that my patch would be unacceptable
as-is.  Is this something that might be useful to anybody besides me?  If so,
would anybody be interested in helping to clean it up for possible inclusion
into yum-utils?


I can post the patch somewhere that is deemed more appropriate, but here's what
I have at this point.  http://pastebin.com/m7edc0c50