Yum and SRPMs

Sadda Teh saddateh at gmail.com
Mon Nov 28 01:48:12 UTC 2005


I'm thinking the "yum install --source packagename" would do the following:

1. Download src rpms and dependent libraries required for successfully
rebuilding the requested source download(s)
2. Extract the the source tarball to some standard location so the developer
can cd to that dir and be able to immediately do a ./configure && make
without errors

I agree that having this functionality in yum may not be the best place.
But, since yum already handles dependency resolution, how hard would this
functionality really be to add? I just tried yumdownloader  --source and all
it did was download the src rpm to the current dir and nothing more. This is
one step removed from going to the FTP and downloading the file. I tried
yumdownloader --source yum-utils and it didn't even work. So it's clear
yumdownloader does not have the functionality I desire, nor the
functionality that it probably should have at a bare minimum (that is
finding src equivalents of binary packages).

As for one tool doing one job well (a dogmatic mantra to begin with)...
yum-utils is a 19K RPM. Is this so much code that it couldn't be integrated
into yum? is someone saying the 19K of code is going to destroy yum's
pristine architecture? So beyond actually adding code to yum to download the
src rpm, would adding step 2. be such a conceptual leap for a tool that
probably should have factored in this functionality from its inception?

On 11/27/05, Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 08:17:06PM -0500, Sadda Teh wrote:
> > Now consider the scenario where the developer can yum install --source
> > some-package, and have it install the source along with all the
> dependent
> > source packages. Then he would be able to cd to some dir where he can
> type
> [...]
>
> That's a very long, tragic tale. But what in this story suggests that "yum
> install --source" is so much better than "yumdownloader --source"? Or even
> slightly better?
>
> --
> Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
> Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>
>
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