[users] RPMforge status update

[Dag Wieers]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Dag Wieers wrote:

> 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.

I forgot to explain the own and tag2.

The 'own' means who of the 3 of us build the packages for the official 
'rpmforge' tree. We don't have a central buildsystem atm and there is no 
need to (rpmrepo will change this) so this flag is to define who is the 
owner of the dist/arch combination.

The 'tag2' is there because at some point in our existence we changed the 
disttag. Like rhfc1 instead of fc1. The file I pasted is actually the 
complete definition that is used for the scripts to create the filesystem 
tree (hardlinking packages, symlinks, SRPMs) and create repository 
metadata.

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