RPM roadmapping

[Bill Crawford]

On 31/07/07, Theodore Papadopoulo <Theodore.Papadopoulo at sophia.inria.fr> wrote:

> The use case is the "customisation" using rpms of a group of machine for
> which it is needed to modify some config files
> belonging to some other rpm. A maybe not too good example would be to
> modify /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora*
> to add eg some local mirror. Right now, this is impossible as those
> files belong to the redhat-release package (as of FC5), so
> pushing such a modification requires creating a new version of this
> package, which is definitely not clean.

This is a good use-case for basically replacing redhat-release with
your own locally-rolled config package (and presumably you'd have to
Provides: redhat-release = whatever).

> The attribute %config(noreplace) is of no use in such a case.

It's good if you have it used in the package that provides an original
config that you then modify. The best option is of course a search
path for files, like the old XFILESEARCHPATH that libXt uses to find
app-defaults files and so on.

> I do not know if this is at all feasible in a sensible way, but
> something allowing the configuration of multiple machines
> would really be helpful.

I do think you might look at repackaging some of the packages which
have files you want to override (basically adding a new Source[n] or
Patch[n] to the .spec and rebuild). However, what you're proposing
sounds pretty useful too.

>     Theo.