On Fri, 2003-03-28 at 00:12, garrick wrote: > Hi all, > I just wanted to ping the list about yum support for building > header.info "on the fly" and downloading the rpm headers directly from > the rpm files. This basicly means yum wouldn't require anything at all > on the server-side, so it would work with any arbitrary directory of > rpms somewhere on the Inet. > > headers.info would be created by reading a directory listing for > local and ftp directories, and html parsing for http directories. And > before you say that html parsing would be difficult, just look at: > lynx -source http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/garrick | \ > sed -n 's/.*<a href="\?\([^>]\+\.rpm\)"\?>.*/\1/ip' > > The only downside is that things might slow down a bit, but I don't > think it would be drastic. It would certainly be possible to make this > only a fallback behavior iff the headers/ directory didn't exist. I think this being a fallback mode wouldn't be such a horrible idea - but using it as the default would slow things down. The hard(er) parts: 1. making sure you didn't get redirected offsite 2. you'll have to read through every rpm in a listing and potentially follow dir links out. The trouble is that it will take some time to read the header from each rpm even if it is a. a src.rpm, b. an old, unremoved rpm, c. not for your architecture - you have to do this b/c you cannot trust the filename - for the moment we can assume that a .rpm is an rpm of some kind. 3. You'll have to completely rescan a url everytime you update b/c you won't know what's changed. Storing a cache of the data you scanned (maybe something like the header.info ;) and comparing that to your filelist would shorten the startup time for a second run of the server-less client. A good place to start (if anyone is interested right away) is to get yum to handle an arbitrary rpm on the command line (just a local file). Then get it to handle an arbitrary url to an rpm on the command line. Then get it to handle iterating over a bunch of them. At the moment I don't have the time to work on this but it's something I find interesting even if I don't think it will be very fast. -sv
