Yum in EPEL [Was: packages that conflict with centos?]

Dag Wieers dag at wieers.com
Mon Aug 6 14:21:56 UTC 2007


On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Jeff Sheltren wrote:

> On Jul 27, 2007, at 8:48 AM, Michael DeHaan wrote:
> 
> >I haven't looked at these packages yet, but I'm really glad to see this work
> >being done. I mentioned this on #epel a few days ago -- lots of folks will be
> >looking for yum to be there.
> >
> >The selfish reason for me to want it is that Cobbler
> >(http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) uses it for repository management and is
> >otherwise broken in EPEL (http://cobbler.et.redhat.com) -- the not so selfish
> >reason is tons of RHEL4 users are already using yum for various things
> >(including maintaining their own repositories of lots of stuff, including,
> >sometimes, updates) and it would be nice if they could get their yum from
> >EPEL and use yum with EPEL if they wanted.
>
> The second issue was that RHEL 4 users can't use yum for system updates.  Do
> we need to provide a wiki page explaining to RHEL users that yum is available
> only to fill dependencies and shouldn't be used directly?  What are people's
> thoughts on this -- especially those that use RHEL?  Is it confusing to have
> yum if RHEL can't use it to do system updates?

They can, with a tool called mrepo. mrepo can mirror repositories and RHN 
channels and provide update packages for different RHEL versions, channels 
and archs to an internal network (or the local system).

For a single system this may be overkill (wrt. harddisk space) but for a 
small network of RHEL (or CentOS) systems, the ability to mirror, manage 
and browse repositories is a joy.

Besides, in no production environment do you want to enable a repository 
like RPMforge or EPEL (or even RHEL) without first testing these packages. 
So you need a way to move packages from a mirrored repository to a 
staging/testing/production repository on a case to case basis.

mrepo allows you to do that with little configuration.

You can find mrepo at:

	http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/mrepo/

(there is work underway to also support NLD/SLES automatically, which is 
currently only mildly supported or requires manual steps)

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]




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