On Mon, 22 Dec 2008, James Antill wrote: > On Tue, 2008-12-23 at 00:04 +0100, Dag Wieers wrote: > >> I can add that I would be happy to use the latest and greatest createrepo >> if those newer versions would work with older distributions (namely, older >> python versions) and if they can produce metadata that works with older >> yum/apt releases as well. (Also on RHEL2.1 and RH7.3 systems) > > AFAIK noone has any plans to backport any version of createrepo to work > with RHEL-2.1 or older. There was (and still is on RHEL5) a createrepo with the -n option of which the _only_ purpose is to support those distributions. Now Seth already made clear that the support was broken in later releases (but the option still worked) and he had no interest to revive it. So I have not tried out any new versions (and so no sqlite metadata...). But it was unfortunate that when repomd was designed, it was not designed for supporting a distribution that was still more than 4 years from being unsupported by Red Hat. And that despite our needs, the repomd XML format was nog slightly changed (making Epoch tag optional). And that to me is worrysome. (repoview still has a bug, and my patch to support it was never applied) Imagine creating a createrepo release *now* that would no longer support the RPM quirks that ship with RHEL4. The lack of such backward compatibility is what I have seen many times for basic infrastructure (like eg. yum) on and on because development is only targetted to Fedora. > There is a nebulous plan to create a simple script² which can be used > on "older" releases, which will take the normal createrepo (without -d) > and just add the .sqlite files in. > How far back it'll go isn't clear yet (having not been written), but > I'd guess that without help from you RHEL-2.1 is probably not going to > be tested. Well, I have send in bugreports and patches in the past with the only result of having seen the bugreports been deleted (yes, not just closed) and either no or little response that was helpful. So if I sound a bit harsh on things, it's because there's some history (and lost time/effort) attached :) -- -- dag wieers, dag at centos.org, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]