Fedora Offline Package Manager (RUM) version 0.0.1 released

[Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray]

> You might want to consider renaming this.

That is why I stressed on "Fedora Offline Package Manager" and put
"RUM" in the parenthesis. I could not directly remove "RUM" since a
few people had come to call it by that name.

If you have any suggestions for a new name, please let me know. :-)

>> 1. Profile management:
>>   a. Exporting the profile of the local system.
>>   b. Importing the profile of another system.
>>   c. Deleting existing profiles.

> I am not sure I understand the need for profiles.

Say you are the only person with an internet connection in your entire
friend circle, which has many Fedora users. So while creating YumPacks
for each of your friends, you need to know how their rpmdb looks like.
That way you only put what is missing on the target machine in the
YumPack. The "profile" is nothing but an archive containing the
/var/lib/rpm directory.

Of course you may want to create a single large YumPack containing all
the dependencies of a package irrespective of what the target machine
already has. ie., if you are trying to create a YumPack for Totem, it
should include Gtk, Gstreamer, etc.. even if your friend has it. You
can do this by creating a "new" profile, which would essentially be an
empty rpmdb.

I have kept this feature out of this release, since the focus was on a
low feature-set, yet stably functional application. If there are no
major bugs found in 0.0.1, I will tryo to put this in 0.0.2.

>> 2. YumPack creation
>>   - Although I have tested this to the best of my ability, I would
>> appreciate if you could try to create new YumPacks and verify whether
>> the dependencies are being correctly resolved.

> Do you have any documentation on creating yum packs?

All the documentation till now were based on the first couple of
prototypes which were basically CLI utilities. You can read about the
first prototype (rum.sh) at http://www.ilug-cal.org/wiki/index.php/RUM

I am writing the documentation for the GUI application
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DebarshiRay/rum but it is not yet
finished.

>> To install package(s) from a YumPack, you would need to untar the
>> YumPack, which is essentially an uncompressed Tar archive, and use
>> 'system-install-packages' to install the RPMs as you would normally
> > do.

> Why uncompressed?

No particular reason, except that on Fedora Core 6 compressed archives
of the rpmdb would lead to strange behaviour. Thus I am trying to stay
clean of any compressed archive.

> Do you plan on GUI integration of yum packs to system-install-packages directly?

Yes, and probably some collaboration with RevISOr too. The idea is to
have something similar to APTonCD. I need to discuss these with my
GSoC 2007 mentor too.

> Is there any integration with Presto?

Don't know, since I have not yet tried out Presto.

> I would appreciate if you can provide a rpm package for testing. Thanks
> for working on this.

Okay, but one can still install it from source for the time being.

Happy hacking,
Debarshi
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