[users] RPMforge status update

[Dag Wieers]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Fabian Arrotin wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 00:42 -0400, Bill McGonigle wrote:
>> Glad to hear the server issues are getting solved.
>>
>> On Mar 5, 2008, at 08:20, Dag Wieers wrote:
>>
>>> ### Authoritative
>>> #nick tag  arch    dir           author  own yum apt md tag2     desc
>>> fc8a  fc8  x86_64  fedora/8      dries   y   n   y   y  -
>>> Fedora Core 8
>>> fc8i  fc8  i386    fedora/8      dries   y   n   y   y  -
>>> Fedora Core 8
>>
>> I may be the only one who doesn't get this, but could you clarify the
>> own/yum/apt/md/tag2 columns?
>>
>> e.g. does this mean you won't be building yum repo metatdata for
>> Fedora 8?  That would make doing upgrades and such quite hard, as I
>> know how to do it, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
>
> No, that only means that such release doesn't need the old style yum
> metadata (understand yum-arch) and only createrepo ... at least that's
> what i've understood from the converstation i had with Dag about the
> same question .. ;-)

Indeed, apt means genbasedir, yum means yum-arch and md means createrepo.
A recent apt and yum can use both repomd metadata so in essence only 
repomd metadata would be necessary. If repomd didn't have its own issues 
and some depsolvers are simply faster with apt metadata than with repomd 
metadata.

A small overview:

 	old-style yum metadata ('yum')
 		used by up2date, older yum and smart

 	old-style apt metadata ('apt')
 		used by up2date, apt and smart

 	repomd metadata ('md')
 		used by apt, yum and smart

The old-style yum metadata is only useful when people are restricted to 
use up2date (so RHEL2.1, RHEL3 and RHEL4 owners). Sadly yum-arch is being 
deprecated (and the tool is removed) even though people may want to create 
this metadata for certain distributions.

The old-style apt metadata is still the prefered way for apt and smart 
since it is generally faster and contains all the information to have a 
deterministic result.

The repomd metadata is generally used by new yum, although smart and apt 
can use it as well. However, the newer metadata (FC8+ ?) needs to be 
created with a createrepo using sqlite that does not install properly on 
CentOS5/RHEL5 and before you know it the repomd metadata causes a few 
hurdles for people that want to create repositories for different 
distributions on a single system.

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]