Jack Neely wrote: >Folks, > >I know this has been touched on and rubbed up and down some but I can't >figure out for the life of me what decided or if this was just full of >crack. Specifically, I'm looking at the option of being able to keep >and make the kernel and openafs package be a certain version. If your >machine gets installed and has a kernel/openafs packages that are to >high, you install the lower packages. If its time for an upgrade you >don't upgrade past the specific version. (The latter handled by >pkgpolicy). > >Is this functionaluty a part of the declairitive package stuff that has >been discussed before? > > It's not in yum and there's no add on to do it yet. Ideally it need to have hooks at a low enough level to be able to use the rpmlib transactionset in such a way that new packages are added within the same transaction as stuff you don't want is removed. I think requirements set for a pinning type system should include: - Be able to hold a given package at a specified version. - Be able to let any packages not held continue being upgraded as normal. - Be able to downgrade a package to the specified held version. - Allow upgrades up to and including the specified hold version. A related subject is having the ability to control what packages a machine should have, for which you need to be able to: - Add packages that are not present in some list/rpmgroup you store somewhere in whatever configuration management system you use. - Remove packages that are not in the list/rpmgroup of packages that are supposed to be on the machine. Not sure how autodependencies should be dealt with. It you say you want package A which them pulls in B automatically (you don't specify it's required) then if you then remove A you probably want to remove B too. This ties into the verification idea too - you probably want to do more than validate the installed rpms - you want to validate that the right rpms are installed. Being able to list exaclty which rpms/rpmgroups should be on a machine or a specific group of machines also lets you do things like keep track of per machine licensed software (e.g. we have vmware licenses for 150 machines). Carwyn
