[et-mgmt-tools] What do you want in yum/channel management tools?

[David Lutterkort]

On Thu, 2007-05-17 at 11:55 -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote:

> Basically we want to make it easier to create channels, to mirror 
> existing channels, to add software to channels, to compose channels, and 
> to control access of what computers (or profiles, etc) have access to 
> what channels.

That would be really useful. Having used mrepo some, which addresses
similar use cases, my two biggest problems with it are (1) mirrors are
flaky, and switching mirrors requires editing the mrepo config (2) mrepo
is file-based, not package-based; that makes defining what exactly to
mirror cumbersome and fragile.

One approach would be to define a 'channel' through a (partial)
kickstart file, one that just has repo statements and a %packages
section, with the resulting package set being the (partially) depclosed
set of packages from the repos for that channel; might be that the %
packages syntax for kickstart needs to be amended to accomodate all the
ways in which people want to compose channels, but that will have to be
seen.

In addition, there's a lot of overlap with existing yum-utils; it would
definitely be good to avoid code duplication with them, instead
extending/refactoring as much as possible. As an example, yum doesn't
deal with rsync URL's right now. If that is needed for this mirroring
tool, it should be added to yum instead of using mirroring-specific
code.

There's some obvious overlap with mirror manager, too [1], especially
when it comes to describing what is being mirrored; not sure how much of
what's described on that page is implemented currently.

David

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/MirrorManagement