Creating completely custom Package and repodata

[Adam Grossman]

On 08/05/2014 05:16 PM, David Shea wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for your response.  If those are the steps, I will try running 
those steps again on a clean directory tree.  Perhaps there was some 
leftovers from an earlier attempt, or forgot a switch.

thank you very much,
atg