One of the things thats been in the pipeline for a long time is yum's awareness of the entire product lifecycle. The way we ship centos-release right now, it only 'sees' the latest release, so in the CentOS-5 tree, at the moment you can only 'see' 5.3/ - should you need an older kernel or anything from 5.0/5.1/5.2 - that requires going in and fiddling / creating repo stanza's
So what I would like to do is add awareness of these tree's into the centos-release package, but leave them disabled. allowing people to do things like :
yum --enablerepo=5.2 --showduplicates list kernel
however, while that does look quite nice and clean it will fail to give the user what they mostly want. so they will need something like this :
yum --enablerepo=base-5.2 --enablerepo=updates-5.2 --show duplicates list kernel
which is more along the lines of what someone might be looking for - all kernel packages in the current release+updates, and all the kernel packages released in 5.2's cycle.
So, to work around this and to actually create a '5.2' repository we could just have a set of metadata that includes all of 5.2 and 5.2 Updates. Or we can leave it like this, needing people to enable both base and updates if they want a list of all the packages.
Are there any more options ?
Is there any interest in the Extras/ Plus/ repo's being available like this as well ?
also, while we are at it, we can also drop in repo stanza's for debuginfo's and sources. Over the next few weeks I am going to change the way the debuginfo packages are pushed - which will make it possible to push those in sync with the binary packages.
Another related question, targeted mostly at Seth and James - can creatrepo'd metadata contain a baseurl that is on a different host ? Can yum handle that ? if so, we could have the metadata on mirror.centos.org while the older packages can stay at vault.