[Yum] Bleeding edge avoidence

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Les Mikesell wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 08:13 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>
>> Reproducing an installation starts to approach a valid reason :) However
>> build and file time stamps are not reliable way of doing this, nothing
>> guarantees that packages arrive in a given repository in the order they
>> are built: for example the vendor might have a heavier testing programme
>> for the kernel than some minor package, causing kernel to arrive in the
>> repo much later than some other package despite having an older timestamp.
>>
>> If you want reproducable installations, use versionlock (plugin
>> available in yum-utils) on the packageset you tested and forget about
>> timestamps.
>
> Is there documentation available for the various plugins and how
> to use them together?  For example, given a tested system, how
> would you tell a box in a different location to update/install
> to the same packages and versions?

You can set the versionlock file to be somewhere remote, eg 
locklist=http://my.main.server.com/versionlock/distro/$releasever or 
similar. Then you just control that one file, all yum update/install 
operations will use the versions specified there no matter what other 
versions are available.

> Also, now that the download-only option has been moved out of yum 
> itself, how do you tell it to pre-fetch the packages you are going to 
> need (either for this or a normal 'update'), so as to be able to plan 
> the timing of the actual package installation/updates in a way not tied 
> to internet bandwidth or health of remote repositories?

One way to do "download only" with current yum itself is to set 
tsflags=test in yum.conf, that way it'll just perform a transaction test 
but not actually do anything to the system. Or you can write a five-line 
plugin to make it stop once download completes.

 	- Panu -