"yum update" with most of the rpms already on a USB key?

[Michael J Gruber]

Robert P. J. Day venit, vidit, dixit 02.03.2009 14:57:
> On Mon, 2 Mar 2009, Mike Cloaked wrote:
> 
>>
>>
>> Robert P. J. Day-2 wrote:
>>>   so, just so i don't misunderstand, i want to do a *full* system
>>> update, but i want to specify a local directory to check *first*
>>> for any necessary rpm files before venturing online, in order to
>>> minimize downloading.  is that what's going to happen here?
>>> thanks.
>> One option is to plug in your usbkey, and then rsync or cp the rpms over to
>> /var/cache/yum....  on the system you are about to update.  Then yum -y
>> update will update the full system, and only download any additional rpms
>> into /var/cache/yum/ that it needs over and above those you copied in from
>> the key.
> 
>   i thought of that and was fairly sure it would work, but that
> approach has two issues:
> 
> 1) i wasn't *absolutely* sure that yum doesn't squirrel away any
> accompanying meta-info as it's populating /var/cache/yum so i was a
> little nervous about just dumping a pile of extra rpms in there which
> yum itself didn't stash there.
> 
> 2) on some systems, /var might be a separate filesystem and just isn't
> capable of handling 1 or 2 Gig of packages tossed into it.  (yes,
> yes, symlinks, i know. :-)
> 
> hence wanting to specify an additional local repository to be used
> in conjunction with the standard online one.  i'm still a little
> nervous about the earlier suggestion of:
> 
>   # yum localupdate /location/of/updates/*.rpm
> 
> in my mind, specifying an explicit list of rpms to "update" always
> makes me think that it should be trying to update *exactly* that set
> of packages.  that's not what i want -- i want a full system update
> for which i can identify a convenient local directory that can contain
> any useful *subset* of packages that don't need to be downloaded.

localupdate only updates the mentioned packages, plus dependencies. But
you can always follow up with an ordinary "yum update".

> sort of:
> 
>   # yum update --look_here_first <local_dir_name_full_of_rpms>
> 
> is that what that "localupdate" incantation is going to do?  and if

No, see above.

> so, isn't there an appropriate option to specify just the directory,
> rather than having to wildcard the entire set of rpm file names in
> that directory?

cp'ing/rsync'ing over works fine.

If you do this often it may be worthwhile to "createrepo" on the stick
and to specify that repo as a permanent yum repo.

Michael