On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Warren Young <warren at 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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com