yum enhancement request - save bandwidth

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 11:51:26PM -0700, Jerry Williams wrote:
> 
> Would it be possible to add a line to yum to say look here first.
> And "here" could be either another directory that might be nfs mounted or a
> web site.  If you find the package then use the local copy if not then go
> and pull it down from whatever site.
> 
> I am only talking about packages, not headers.

If you do not have headers, or more precisely repository metadata,
then yum will not look there.  OTOH there is nothing which prevents
you from adding these data to a local directory with a help of
a 'createrepo' run.  This is rather trivial although you may want
to consider '-g' option with a suitable comps.xml to have group
data there as well.  Check 'man createrepo'.

How to _easily_ make yum to look there first, especially in a
presence of 'mirrorlist', is way past "Aunt Tilly" level.  Even
less so with yum-updatesd.  Not out of question, mind you, but
it would be nice to have some obvious hooks for things of that sort.

Actually it is not even that clear from docs that yum will
accept URLs in 'file:///some/path/here' forms.  If you wonder then
it does.  That detail that a part of such path may come from
some mount over a network is irrelevant.  'yum' is also smart
enough to skip "downloading" of files which are available locally.

   Michal