[rhn-users] Off-line update

[Bob Gorman]

At 12:24 PM 3/4/2004, Daniel Wittenberg wrote:
>I was thinking the other day about having a vmware machine that was a
>base install of update1, and then when it needs patches just run:
>
>up2date --update --download
>
>just to download the RPM's, and then scp those to a central place to use
>during the build process like you say here.  Didn't really think it
>through, but was thinking about giving it a shot.

 From an automated perspective this is your best (only?) available approach.

However, it only gets you the RPMs in use on that 'base' system.

To counter this you can make a list of all available packages with --showall, 
then compare it to the RPMs you have already downloaded and saved. Something like this:

  up2date --showall | sort -u >all
  ls /myrpms | sed -s 's/\.rpm$//' >have
  comm -23 all have >want
  wc -l all have want | fgrep -v total

You can then take the 'want' file and work from there.

Note that past package versions, and different kernel version, must be downloaded manually via the RHN web site.  There are also some minor discrepancies with IBMJava2, but that may not effect you.

I still think the best approach would be to hack up2date to over come it's limitations. It's just a python script after all.

-- 

I build custom Linux solutions - Hire me - I'll make it work.
mailto:bob(at)rsi.com, http://www.rsi.com/, 617.965.1700