Yum repros wanted

[Sean O Sullivan]

Temlakos wrote:

> 
> Then I'd like to share with you my experience with obtaining and 
> updating mplayer. because that might have a bearing on that particular 
> problem that you had.
> 
> Mplayer is out in what its developers are afraid might be their last 
> version--something about the European Parliament passing a law against 
> any player that can play anybody's content. Anyway, FreshRPMS has the 
> only version of mplayer that seems actually to work. Livna's version of 
> MPlayer just won't load, and won't stay loaded when I try to open a 
> video with it.
> 
> So I looked up the listing for mplayer in smart, and found that yes, 
> FreshRPMS has it, but I had set its priority down to 8, rather than the 
> 10 I use for base, updates-released, extras, livna, and others.
> 
> To fix that problem I granted an /exception/ to FreshRPMS's version of 
> mplayer: I declared that /that package alone/ would carry a priority of 
> 10, equal to that of livna's version, so that smart would take the newer 
> of the two versions. You can do that in smart--right-click the package 
> name and reassign its priority directly. Since then, smart has obeyed my 
> instructions, and I still have a working version of mplayer on my 
> system--though I am using livna's version of the mplayer fonts. (They 
> are in fact compatible.)
> 
> I need livna to provide semi-official support in Fedora for mp3 and any 
> other file that Fedora can't have in its official repos, because mp3 is 
> not licensed in a way compatible with GNU-GPL.
> 
> By the way: smart is up to version 0.36. I took the tarball and 
> discovered, to my delight, that the Makefile has a routine not only to 
> "make" the program and its C extension, but /also/ to build the RPM! To 
> use it, unpack the file (it's a bz2 archive, so you'll have to 
> right-click and "open with Archive Manager" to do it), change to that 
> directly, and then--not as root, but as an ordinary user--run these two 
> commands in this order:
> 
> $ make
> $ make rpm
> 
> Then change to a directly called "dist". You'll have two binary RPM's, a 
> source RPM, and even a brand-new tarball.
> 
> Then you can issue the command
> 
> $ su --command="rpm -Uvh smart*"
> 
> Or do what I did:
> 
> 1.    Set up your very own yum-style repository:
> 
>     A.    Create a directory in /var/lib--say, /var/lib/yum.
>     B.    Copy the two RPM's to it--and any other RPM that
>         you build or acquire.
>     C.    Chown all rpm's to root:
> # chown root *.rpm
>     D.    Chmod all rpm's to 755:
> # chmod 755 *.rpm
>     C.    Issue this command:
> 
> # createrepo /var/lib/yum [or however you named your folder]
> 
> 2.    In /etc/yum.repos.d/, write a .repo file to point to your new 
> repo. Give it a baseurl of "file:///var/lib/yum" or whatever.
> 
> 3.    Execute the command:
> 
> # yum install smart
> 
> Then you can run smart, configure it to recognize your RPM installed 
> base (you have a channel type just for that) and all your repos, set 
> their priorities--and you're in business.
> 
> For everyone's information, I followed Michael A. Peters' advice and set 
> up an environment to build my own rpm's, which is the best and safest 
> way to install java onto an FC4 installation. (The release notes warn 
> you not to use Sun's own rpm for java.) After that, I knew I simply 
> /had/ to invent a system to manage all those rpm's from smart. So I 
> created my own repo. I am very pleased with the results I have obtained.
> 
> Temlakos
> 
Ahhh right, cool ...
Well I usually stuck with cmd-line version of smart, not keen on many 
GUI versions of such things.
I was very impressed as I mensioned with Smart, and I will defintely try 
it again, as I think if one package manager can take over from all 
others - or at least be used on every distro, it will be an advantage 
(although I'm sure Debian users will not wish to move away from apt, 
understandable however).

Regards,

Sean