[Yum] Interesting yum feature with chroot

[Troy Dawson]

Howdy Ho,
This is an interesting feature of yum that I came upon by accident.  Not that 
I didn't think yum could do this, it just had never crossed my mind.  And 
incase anyone needs to do this, now you know you can.

I have several build machines with several version's of linux on several 
partitions.  One nice thing about this is that if I need to build the same 
thing on two different versions of linux, I can just chroot in the other 
partition, and build away.  I usually do this when building things for Fermi 
Linux 7.3.1 and 7.1.1.

Well, as is often the case, I sometimes don't have the right libraries or 
rpm's when I'm building, and it's always been a hastle to get it installed on 
the other partition, because I have to download it, move it to where that 
partition can see it, and install it.

Well yesterday I was building KDE 3.1 on my FL 7.1.1 paritition, needed the 
python-devel rpm, and just did a yum install python-devel in the chrooted 
window, purely by instinct.  About 10 minutes later it hit me what I had just 
done, and double checked to make sure I really did that.  Sure enough, my 
yum.conf was setup correctly on that chroot partition, and it pulled in the 
right rpm's and everything.

So the end result is, you can use yum even when you are chroot'ed.

Troy
p.s. Some of you might have already known that you could do that, but for me 
it was a neat revelation, and a further time saver.

-- 
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Troy Dawson  dawson at fnal.gov  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/OSS  CSI Group
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