[CentOS] Local mirroring of the CentOS repos

Kai Schaetzl wrote:
> Ashley M. Kirchner wrote on Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:59:53 -0600:
> 
>> Uhhh, I don't experience that when I run my rsync script.  It 
>> actually does delete stuff that's no longer on the mirror.
> 
> Yeah, but the repo seems to keep a lot ... I downloaded 5 or more versions 
> of the same rpm of some software (for instance all the kernel packages, 
> openoffice stuff in three versions) because there were two months or so 
> between my first retrieval and the second (as I didn't have time to 
> continue earlier)
> 
> So, 
>> somewhere, someone is cleaning out the mirrors of old stuff.  Now, an 
>> argument for how often this happens might be more like it, but it does 
>> happen.
> 
> Ah, well, so the CentOS 5 updates repo hasn't been "cleaned" yet? In that 
> case they didn't clean it since starting it. From looking at the CentOS 4 
> repo's it looks like they don't clean, though. Repos get "automatically" 
> cleaned when moving over from x.1 to x.2 etc. So, when 5.1 arrives the 
> repo will have been cleared by then and start anew.
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that they keep all those files. 
> There may be good reasons to do so, I don't know. I merely wanted to see 
> if I can do something from my side to avoid getting it all. Apparently, I 
> can avoid it when regularly downloading by specifying a timelimit, but I 
> can't avoid getting it all when I start a mirror (unless I use a 
> filelist).
> 
> Kai
> 

Why don't you want to keep old updates? What if you need to roll back 
because of some bad bug introduced in the latest version? The you have 
to go back to get either the original or the update that came before the 
version you have. And also, don't say mirror if you don't want to have 
the same packages. Just say you want to create a new repository 
containing some of the packages from the centos mirror.