[CentOS-devel] yum being aware of earlier releases

Sun Jun 21 15:45:28 UTC 2009
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>

On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 09:40 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> 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.
[...]
> Are there any more options ?

yum --enablerepo=*-5.2 --showduplicates  list kernel

...you could also add stuff to the aliases plugin, Eg.

CENTOS-5.2-BASE --enablerepo=base-5.2
CENTOS-5.2 CENTOS-5.2-BASE --enablerepo=updates-5.2

...then it could be used like:

yum CENTOS-5.2 list kernel --showduplicates

...as a long term. option we'd like to solve this kind of grouping
problem with repo. tags (see upstream createrepo/yum). That may not be
viable to use for CentOS-5 though, not sure.

[...]
> 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.

 Yeh, that works and AIUI Fedora koji static repos. use that
functionality (so it's tested :).

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora