On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Warren Young warren@etr-usa.com wrote:
No, its not what I what. I have multiple boxes but in different locations,
So put the repo server out in the cloud somewhere. Put it on a public-facing box the others all have access to, or rent a VPS somewhere, or grab some EC2 space, or...
None of the suggested approaches are impossible. They just seem like a lot very unnecessary work to maintain some installations of a distribution whose main feature is that updates are supposed to not break things.
If you've included a few programs from EPEL (etc.), do you mirror that too?
Who mentioned mirroring?
How else can you be sure you have all packages needed for some arbitrary mix of installations?
A local repo is just a copy of a set of packages that does what you want. It doesn't necessarily have to have everything available in all repos you pull from.
So the same person has to do the installs of of the all the machines? Or coordinate with a group? That seems somewhat unreasonable.
If you think you want the freedom to install random things in an ad hoc fashion, that kind of goes against the idea of a tested repo.
I don't want my own tested repos containing the same packages that are available in the distribution. I want to be able to tell yum to reproduce the package list/versions that are on the tested system. It knows where to get them. Isn't it overkill to keep a whole repo snapshot copy when you really just need a way to tell yum the package versions you want on the 2nd box? If packages were routinely deleted from the public repos, cloning them to make sure you could get a copy of an older version in the future might make sense, but I don't think that has ever been an issue.
And even simpler than tracking the full package/version list would be a way to tell yum to pretend that any packages in the repo newer than the update on the test box were not there. But, I don't think that meshes with the way repo metadata normally works - it probably would have trouble finding versions newer than installed but not the very latest even though it is trivial to see them in a directory listing yourself.