[CentOS-devel] yum being aware of earlier releases

Sat Jun 20 08:40:27 UTC 2009
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

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.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq