Creating completely custom Package and repodata

[David Shea]

On 08/05/2014 04:54 PM, Adam Grossman wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am completely new to this, so this a totally newbie question.  I 
> have been asked to create a very custom CentOS 6.4 release for 
> internal use.  I have had no problems with creating a kickstart file 
> and customizing it from the options in 
> "http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart", and all my %pre 
> scripts have worked great.  The only place i am stuck at is creating a 
> a completely a custom "core" group and other custom groups.  My only 
> attempt so far was to create a custom group by:
>
> yum-groups-manager --merge repodata/<*.comp.xml file>  -n 
> "customgroup" --id=customgroup --description "Custom packages" -c 
> yum.conf --save=repodata/<*.comp.xml file> <package name>
>
> (yum.conf is the repo for repo with the custom rpms) . When i added 
> "customgroup" to the "%packages" section, as getting errors saying 
> that the group can not be found.
>
> before i run "createrepo" and try doing this all from scratch, i was 
> hoping to at least get a custom group working with the existing repodata.
>
> I might have completely missed it, but i can not find any detailed 
> information on how the repodata and the files in there work, and how 
> to setup a completely custom repo on the ISO.  Does anyone know where 
> i can find detailed documentation explaining how this works, or point 
> me to a tutorial on how to do what i am looking to do?  I not only 
> need to get this done, but i also want to understand what it is doing 
> and how it works so i can more self-sufficient and do all of these 
> cleanly and correctly.

Once you've created the new comp.xml file with yum-group-manager, you 
need to regenerate the repodata using createrepo -g <comp.xml file>. If 
customgroup if showing up in your new comp.xml with all of the packages 
you need, then I think that's all you're missing.

I don't know of any tutorials or documentation on the repodata beyond 
the man pages for the various tools, but if you still have trouble you 
might be able to get more information on yum's mailing list at 
http://lists.baseurl.org/mailman/listinfo/yum.