Where to find old development rpms?

[Mike A. Harris]

Orion Poplawski wrote:
> Are older development rpms being archived any where?  I'd like to test 
> out an older kernel....

Our public repositories contain only the latest build of a particular
package for the development tree, or latest update build for a given
OS release.  Once a new package is built and made available, the old
ones are pruned from the repositories.

With our new 'brew' buildsystem, it appears that every build gets
kept internally in brew's repository trees, although I'm not sure
if it has a garbage collection policy or not.  With our older
'beehive' buildsystem, it had a garbage collection policy which
I believe defaulted to keeping the last 3 builds around, but
purging all builds before that.  A developer could configure the
buildsystem to change the garbage collection policy for a given
build, and some have done so.

So, in theory at least, we do have some binary builds kept internally
for various packages, however these are not mirrored publicly
anywhere I don't believe.

The easiest way to obtain older rpms is to make a CVS checkout from
public Fedora CVS, and rebuild the package with mock.  That will not
give a 100% identical copy of the original binaries however, as your
system may contain a newer compiler, or other newer or older packages
than what was originally used to build the package at Red Hat.  In
most cases, this should not matter, but there could be cases where
something has changed over time which could cause the build to fail,
or cause the build to succeed but produce software that works
differently.

The only way to obtain the exact binaries that were released previously,
is to keep copies of all binaries released over time into your own
cache of rpms, in case you need them again.  Alternatively, you may
be able to obtain an older build from the maintainer of the given
package by asking them nicely - but that should be done with
discretion as a last resort as it doesn't scale well, and developers
probably would not like to start getting lots of daily requests for
older packages from tens or hundreds of people.  ;o)

Hope this helps.

-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.