Fedora 7

[Rudi Chiarito]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 06:19:20PM +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> What I'd like to see is some sort of yum-proxy to save bandwidth for
> users. E.g. let some sort of yum-procy run on a local network server;
> fill it's cache with what you have already from the distribution cd;
> clients connect to the proxy; if the package is in the cache send it
> back; otherwise download it from the web, send it over, and put it in
> the cache; now and then check if a package is still in the upstream
> repos; if not, drop it from the cache.

Even better would be the use of mDNS and DNS-SD to search for such a
proxy. This way, you don't need to hardcode anything in configuration
files.

I don't know if yum provides enough hooks to implement such a plugin,
but ideally it would look for a local proxy and fallback to the
"original" repository URL if none can be found. That'd useful if you are
a laptop user and only sometimes have fast local access to such a proxy.
Or it would allow for graceful degradation if the proxy has died or is
undergoing maintenance. Or, in a network with many systems, it can
provide for load balancing, by using more than one proxy (I guess you
can look at all the services discovered on the local network, not just
the first one replying to your broadcast request). All you'd need to do
is installing the plugin's RPM or make a convincing case for its
inclusion in yum itself - not likely to happen today, but maybe in a
few years the use case won't be as uncommon as it is now.

Instead of a proxy, one could also use DNS-SD to implement something
closer to the P2P model, where machines on a local network search for
any neighbour systems that have already downloaded updates, basically
sharing the yum cache.   

-- 
Rudi