Kickstart upgrade package management

[Moray Henderson (ICT)]

>From: Hardik Modi [mailto:hardik at statementofpurpose.com]
>Sent: 17 July 2009 13:11
>
>Hello All,
>
>I've been a satisfied user of kickstart for custom fresh installs for some
>time now. The machines I'm installing to are often not connected to the
>Internet and I'm looking at using the upgrade function to have my machines
>step up from CentOS 4.4 to 5.3.
>
>With a simple upgrade kickstart (only the essential lines), I'm able to
>run through an upgrade cycle. This takes care of most of the packages that
>I expect to see upgraded.
>
>The reason I'm writing to the list is there are a few packages that I'd
>rather the upgrader didn't touch and that I'd then fix up in the post-
>install. Is there a direct way of asserting this 'ignore package' command?
>The guides that I find online are quite clear that the %packages section
>is ignored in an upgrade kickstart.
>
>Thanks!
>Hardik.

Hello Hardik,

Did you get anywhere with this question?  I have just started working on a custom-CentOS-4.2 to custom-CentOS-5.3 kickstart upgrade.  My custom-CentOS-5.3 install only uses CD 1, but the upgrade asks for several others, so there are obviously a number of packages I need to remove somehow.  SELinux also seems to get confused, and starts blocking even more than it's supposed to.

Initial thought on stopping packages being upgraded is to remove them from the upgrade repository.  Building custom install images, if you run createrepo without those packages, you might be able to copy them back into the rpms directory before building your CD.  That should mean they are available manually in %post, but won't be picked up automatically.  Other than that, fiddling with the upgrade code in Anaconda might do it, but that sounds... complicated.


Moray.
"To err is human.  To purr, feline"