On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Jeff Sheltren wrote:
On Jul 27, 2007, at 8:48 AM, Michael DeHaan wrote:
I haven't looked at these packages yet, but I'm really glad to see this work being done. I mentioned this on #epel a few days ago -- lots of folks will be looking for yum to be there.
The selfish reason for me to want it is that Cobbler (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) uses it for repository management and is otherwise broken in EPEL (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) -- the not so selfish reason is tons of RHEL4 users are already using yum for various things (including maintaining their own repositories of lots of stuff, including, sometimes, updates) and it would be nice if they could get their yum from EPEL and use yum with EPEL if they wanted.
The second issue was that RHEL 4 users can't use yum for system updates. Do we need to provide a wiki page explaining to RHEL users that yum is available only to fill dependencies and shouldn't be used directly? What are people's thoughts on this -- especially those that use RHEL? Is it confusing to have yum if RHEL can't use it to do system updates?
They can, with a tool called mrepo. mrepo can mirror repositories and RHN channels and provide update packages for different RHEL versions, channels and archs to an internal network (or the local system).
For a single system this may be overkill (wrt. harddisk space) but for a small network of RHEL (or CentOS) systems, the ability to mirror, manage and browse repositories is a joy.
Besides, in no production environment do you want to enable a repository like RPMforge or EPEL (or even RHEL) without first testing these packages. So you need a way to move packages from a mirrored repository to a staging/testing/production repository on a case to case basis.
mrepo allows you to do that with little configuration.
You can find mrepo at:
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/mrepo/
(there is work underway to also support NLD/SLES automatically, which is currently only mildly supported or requires manual steps)
Kind regards, -- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]