web site ammendments for yum

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at welho.com
Wed Feb 4 09:21:34 UTC 2004


On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Jonas Pasche wrote:

> > > 3) A list of full yum/apt repository configurations
> > 
> > Not sure what that means (how it differs from the mirror list files
> > for apt/yum on the mirrors page).
> 
> People that are downloading yum (and later, apt) from us have it already
> preconfigured. I thought about configuration entries for people that are
> already using a yum/apt from another packager (e.g. freshrpms) for some
> repositories and simply want to include our repository into their
> current configuration instead of completely switching to our version of
> apt/yum.
> 
> The configuration file snippets are mainly the important part of the
> configuration files we ship preconfigured with _our_ yum/apt. Putting
> them on the Download page enables people to use our repositories without
> downloading and installing _our_ yum/apt.
> 
> The principle behind this is:
> 
> People who _don't_ have apt/yum should follow our detailed instructions
> and use our preconfigured packages.
> 
> People who already _have_ apt/yum need information about how they can
> include our repositories into their existing configuration. This
> information isn't yet available in a clean, simple manner.

Indeed. Same goes for fedora.us itself actually..

I think People should be encouraged to use the FL versions of apt/yum
because at least the apt package has various important features like
signature checking embedded which plain upstream apt doesn't have. However 
that's not an excuse for not providing the sources.list/yum.conf 
information in easy copy-paste format.


> 
> > > 4) A list of mirrors to use instead of download.fedoralegacy.org
> > 
> > Is linked to from that page (as a separate mirror page).
> 
> Yes, quite good (the page itself, not its usefullness without any yet
> available mirror).
> 
> > Yes.  But I like having the mirror page separate, if for no other reason
> > than to make it easier to update/automate/etc.
> 
> That's just fine. The link to that page on the Download page should be
> enough here.
> 
> > > Suggestion #2: As the pages are already written in PHP, why not include
> > > a conf.php which ships variables like...
> > 
> > Same problem of keeping the conf.php up to date.
> 
> Not exactly, because you just need to update _one_ file and have the
> others automatically point to current locations.

The apt mirror-list "format" is trivial to parse in php/python/whatever 
language, with a little munging you can formulate the yum baseurl entries 
from it as well. So you only have to keep one mirror-list up to date.

> 
> > > If you're using apt, please add the line that matches your distribution
> > > to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
> > 
> > >From what Jesse told me, I thought there was some way to do this automagically
> > using the files he posted on the mirrors page???
> 
> Well, I'm not an apt expert, but IMHO these files cannot be used by a
> plain apt package. They are repository listings that can be used by
> mirror-select.lua, an apt "plugin" that cares for mirror selection.
> However, this plugin is not yet shipped with apt from freshrpms or apt
> from fedora.us.
> 
> Without an apt package that has the mirror-select.lua script, these
> files are not usable! One can only manually extract the needed
> information and put it into /etc/apt/sources.list.

Yep, apt itself cannot use the mirror list. But like said it's trivial to 
parse the format in a script to generate both yum and apt configs out of 
it.

	- Panu -





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