RH 9 EOL Updates ISOs

[Jon Peatfield]

> >I have been asking around and have just about come to the conclusion that it
> >don't exist. I would like to get CD(s) (or downloadable ISOs) containing all
> >RH 9 updates (SRPM and i386 RPM) up to the point of EOL. I'd like to avoid
> >having to download all the individual packages. With all the mirrors and
> >legacy work going around, I was hoping someone had already put together an
> >ISO. Does anyone know of a source?
> 
> I did something similar for RedHat 7.3 at its EOL.  The frustrating 
> thing (as a former RedHat mirror admin) is that RedHat doesn't really 
> have a policy for removing superseded errata from the updates tree.  
> Upon request, they've periodically purged the updates tree of old RPMs, 
> but even RedHat 9 still has duplicate packages.  Once they do that, it 
> doesn't seem too difficult to produce an ISO (or two).

I make use of a handy repostory maintenance script (rh_buildtree
written by Peter Benie who works in a different department here),
which given a set of directories full of rpms constructs/maintains a
directory which contains the latest version of all those packages
which pass a signature-check (as hard-links to whichever source they
were from -- original shipped version, updates, local-packages etc).

[ We use it to re-build install trees overnight so that a fresh
install always goes straight to having the latest versions available
from the tree (which saves having insecure versions until patched and
also is much quicker).

We also use a script (rpmalert) which checks what versions are
out-of-date on a machine and another (rpm-update) which applies the
updates we have flagged as ok, but I suppose you may have yum/up2date
for that function anyway. ]

I'm still using this older repository maintenance script for my redhat
trees (which takes ~15 minutes to run and (I think) results in an
extra copy of some of the packages on disk).

As part of my experiments with Suse9 I tried Peter's new repository
maintenance script (rpmstream) which usually runs in seconds (since it
keeps more cache info around).

If you just want the latest versions of update packages that could
probably be done easily enough.

> Is this something useful for FedoraLegacy to include in its distribution 
> tree?

Well I'm not sure that iso's would be anything other than a space
waste -- anyone could make their own anyway.  A list of rpms which are
current or a script to generate such a list would be much smaller and
possibly of more use to more people.

 -- Jon