[SLL] yum repos and the mysterious life of releasever

[jkeating]

Brought back to list, I'd prefer to discuss this on list for the
benefit to all.

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:54:05 -0700
Xeno Campanoli <xcampanoli at gmail.com> wrote:

> What about such things as order of precedence, mixing RPMs from
> different distributions, and otherwise working with complex
> combinations?

Those are all client side configurations, and have nothing to do with a
single package repo.  A package repo is an extremely simple thing, it's
a directory of packages and metadata regarding those packages in a
portable format (xml files and sqlite db files)

> What are the meanings to the [title] thingy? 

That is a client side configuration item to reference this particular
package repository.  A client can call repos anything they want, it's
just client side reference.

> How does
> it refer to other things, and what are the restrictions on it?

Any yum actions regarding that repo will use the Title of the repo in
output.  AFAIK the restrictions are that it has to be UTF-8 text, but
I'm not even sure on that.  And again, it's purely client side.

>  Why is
> baseurl commented out in my repo file?  Why is mirrorlist just one
> URL? Can I make my own mirrorlist? 

A repo reference in yum config files can list a set of baseurls or a
mirror list url.  You usually don't have both enabled at once.  We use
mirrorlists to balance requests across the repository mirrors instead
of directing everything to a single download source.  In Fedora we
actually use a cgi to do geoip lookups of your IP address and hand you
a tailored mirror list based on your geographical location.

You can make your own mirror lists, the format is just a flat file
with a list of URLS that would be suitable in the baseurl field.

> What does "enabled=0" disenable?

Yum configs can list any number of individual repositories.  Using
enabled=0 means that this particular repo, while configured, is not
used by default in yum actions.  You can override this at the yum
command line, or otherwise enable it in the config file.

> But most of all, where can I find some detailed repository usages
> that work?

Define 'usages'.  All of this is commented in yum.conf(5) (ie man
yum.conf)

> 
> Respectfully, not having examples like this just limits practical
> programmability to a smaller pool of hackers, and limits usage of the
> distributions, because people are going to implement software on
> platforms where there appears to be documented tendencies to some set
> of interfaces; if not hard and fast specifications, then at least
> known historical usages that people can work with.  Otherwise the
> best will run away screaming with hopes of finding something that
> does yield that level of documentation.

You asked about creating a package repository, not about configuring a
client to use package repositories.  man yum.conf for detailed
information about how to construct yum config files.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project          (fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
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