Yum, Proxy Cache Safety, Storage Backend

[Warren Togami]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:04:51 -0500, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com>
wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:41:40 -0500
> Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> i.e.
>> primary-1201140584.sqlite.bz2
>> 
>> This would be an elegant solution, but will it be possible for us to
>> migrate to because older clients wouldn't be able to handle it?
>> 
>> I'm guessing not, so here are other less efficient but workable
>> solutions.
> 
> Hrm, I would think that this would be possible for recentish clients
> (RHEL5 and later?).  repomd.xml lists out what the other files are,
> and the checksums of them, so if the files are named slightly different
> yum should handle it I would think.
> 
> In fact, I just tried this by hand.  I edited repomd.xml and changed
> 'primary.sqlite.bz2' to 'primary-1234.sqlite.bz2' and then moved the
> file on the file system.  Yum client didn't even blink, it happily
> downloaded the -1234 file.

(away from my computer, can't test this until tomorrow)
Oh cool!  Can somebody please test how far back in yum versions this works
and report back here?

> 
> So if this method is possible, does that change things for the better
> for you?  I think all it would require is slight modification to
> createrepo so that it could timestamp the repo files.
> 

We need to think a bit more and do some testing to be sure there are no
drawbacks in doing this.

If our findings are good, are we comfortable changing this for the Fedora 7
and Fedora 8 updates repos?  This would instantly make reverse proxy
mirrors of Fedora less error prone and *WAY* easier to deploy.

(Let us please do this on static-repos as well, the problem is even worse
there.)

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com