RE: Installing Packages with Proxy

[Seth Vidal <skvidal phy duke edu>]

> So how does up2date etc. work? I am writing a program using RPM which will perform remote upgrades. I am relying on RPM's feature to just get the header information from LAN for a package withpout having to download the entire package ... so users can choose which package is needed. So if proxy doesn't work, most of our customers would not be able to do the same. So I have to have a separate program for first downloading the file and then have RPM just install it. That would make it much less efficient. Does anyone have any clues on how to acoomplish this easily?

actually it makes it fairly more efficient.

I'm working on a rewrite of a program called yup that already does what 
you're wanting to do.

a program is run on the web server/repository of files. this program 
copies the headers from the rpms and stores them individually. Then the 
client programs get the headers for all the rpms. 
It then uses the downloaded headers to determine what things are 
upgraded/obsoleted etc. Then it creates a transactiondict that tells it 
what rpms it will need. it downloads them and install them.

The advantage of downloading the rpm and THEN performing the 
installation/upgrade is that you can 1. create a cache if for any reason 
the program dies during its run, 2. you can see what the last state was if 
there is an error. 3. it makes it easier to sigcheck the rpms b/c they are 
local.

I'll post an early version of my rewrite as soon as I can. It works fairly 
well right now but the output is not pretty, yet.

-sv