genhdlist? (was: Re: updating a distro tree)

[Philip Rowlands]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Klaus Steden wrote:

>I'm being a brave (foolish?) soul and am doing just that ... there's no yum in
>EL4 (at least, I can't find one on the ISOs), so I'm bundling in APT instead.

You could fetch the Fedora Core RPMs for yum, which would almost
certainly just drop in.

>Could someone out there possibly explain to me a little more about what
>genhdlist does, and what its various options mean? It's got a usage
>message, no man page, no info page, and the only docs I've found online
>relate to RH7.2 and earlier.

genhdlist builds the file which maps between package names and files.
For example, comps.xml specifies that the "httpd" package is to be
installed if the user selects the "Web Server" group. Anaconda looks up
"httpd" to discover that relevant file is "httpd-2.0.52-3.1.i386.rpm"

Therefore, say there were an update to "httpd-2.1.23-4.5.i386.rpm" you
could replace the original file in RedHat/RPMS then rebuild
base/hdlist{,2} by running genhdlist.

The options are something like:
--withnumbers	used for building CD sets
--fileorder	used for building hdlist in the right order for
		dependencies
--hdlist	where to put the output
--productpath	used for Fedora (vs RedHat)

(No research here, just guesswork and experience. Void where
prohibited, YMMV.)


Cheers,
Phil