Simple way to update kickstart RPM files?

[whitivery]

Jake Vickers <jake at v2gnu.com> wrote:

>  On 10/01/2010 01:50 AM, whitivery wrote:
>> I have a kickstart server with the files copied from the CentOS
>> 5.5 DVD's "CentOS" directory to a "CentOS" directory on the
>> server, accessed by ftp during kickstart.
>>
>> On a target built by this system, I did a yum update, and over
>> 100 packages were updated.
>>
>> I would like to merge the updates back to the kickstart server.
>>
>> But I don't see a simple way to just throw the *.rpm files (as
>> grabbed from yum's cache) into some "updates" directory and the
>> kickstart will do the right thing and resolve dependencies and
>> install the latest.
>>
>> I would rather the updates just get installed in the first place,
>> instead of having to take a second pass to do some kind of yum
>> update method.
>>
>> Is there an elegant way?
>
>I usually do an install into a VM from my ISO, enable the yum cache, and 
>then perform an update. Once that is complete, I gzip the updates and 
>get them back onto my build machine. This process is a little tedious, 
>but you copy the updates into the package folder for your ISO build and 
>then delete the old versions that are in there. Then just run:
>rm -rf /ISO-Build-Dir/.olddata
>discinfo=`head -1 /ISO-Build-Dir/.discinfo`
>createrepo -u “media://$discinfo” -g repodata/comps.xml /ISO-Build-Dir

Thanks, but I want to avoid having to manually delete the old versions, as
you say it's tedious, and too error-prone - I've seen tools mentioned to
help with that, but would like to find a way to avoid it in the first
place.  The kickstart repo specification, or reposync method, mentioned by
others in this thread might be the way to go.