Announcing RUM: offline update/install tool for YUM/RPM based systems.

[Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray]

I had in an earlier mail discussed the possibility of writing a
separate tool, or an enhancement to YUM or Pirut for offline
update/installation of packages on YUM/RPM based systems, specifically
Fedora.

This formed the basis of my application to Google Summer of Code 2007.
You may find a copy of the proposal at:
http://glug-nith.org/~rishi/download/soc/soc-proposal-fedora-offline

Just to find out whether the back-end work of managing the profiles,
and handling the yum-packs was going to be possible with the existing
tool-set, I wrote a BASH script to do the job. No GUI, just a rough
idea of the functionality. You can read more about it here:
http://www.ilug-cal.org/wiki/index.php/RUM while the code is available
at http://glug-nith.org/~rishi/download/src/rum.sh

However I would like to bring to your attention a few of my
observations. Firstly I understand that YUM does not support the
facility of *just* downloading the packages and *not* installing them.
The idea it seems is to let yumdownloader to do the job. The problem
is that although yumdownloader is able to download packages, its
--resolve option does not work. See
https://devel.linux.duke.edu/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=702 Moreover how
can I ask yumdownloader to consult a different rpmdb than the default
one at /var/lib/rpm?

I am a bit curious to know why it is deemed inappropriate to have this
feature in YUM itself? I do not want to be rude, but isn't it just a
simple task of checking a command line option before actually starting
to install the packages? Right now I have to use the --installroot
option to force YUM to install to a different rpmdb and then delete
everthing after extracting the packages downloaded to
<new_root>/var/cache/yum/*packages/*.rpm to create the yumpack. This
looks messy to me.

Thanks,
Debarshi
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