[Yum] yum and nosrc

[Kenneth Porter]

I'm working on getting a working tomcat5 on my FC2 system, using the 
packages at http://www.jpackage.org/. A serious issue with setting up any 
kind of Java environment is that many packages have ugly licensing 
restrictions that prevent easy distribution as an unencumbered RPM. (See 
the JPackage site for the politics and technical details.) Several packages 
must use a "nosrc" RPM that requires that one download the actual source 
from the upstream (usually Sun) and then mix it with what would normally go 
in a SRPM to create one's binary RPM.

The big reason I use yum instead of raw RPM is because it does dependency 
resolution and downloads the necessary dependencies automatically. This 
breaks when some of the dependencies are nosrc. Those dependencies must be 
manually downloaded, repackaged, and installed before resuming use of yum.

While yum can't install the nosrc dependency, it would be nice if it could 
identify the required package. For tomcat5, 3 of the 4 nosrc requirements 
match the package name on the JPackage site. But one (j2sdk) has no 
matching package name. I'm guessing that j2sdkee is the package required. 
It would be nice if yum could inspect a list of nosrc packages to find the 
ones needed to satisfy the requirements. Sort of a "nosrc repo" that 
contains only metadata and no actual packages.