On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Garrick Staples wrote: > I'd like yum to report full URLs. Then downloading manually would be > trivial. (if you ignore the possiblity of requiring authentication, > configuring proxies, etc). Or, as originally suggested, permit/modify yum to just download the rpm's without installing them. Jeeze, this is pretty simple and you can do it now by ^C'ing right after it finishes putting an rpm in the cache but before it installs. This is just asking for a more elegant exit than a program break (and maybe a syntax that moves the rpm to a given destination path instead of "only" to cache). Agreed, there are tools like wget you can use instead, but you can't do the equivalent of "yum list \*frog\*" to see all rpm's with frog in them in a repository known to match your distribution, then "yum get frog ." to get frog-1.2-1.i386.rpm and put it in the cwd. Another thing that this might be useful for is getting src rpm's. I predict that with Red Hat going heavy commercial, there is going to be a lot more interest in repositories that serve src rpm's, not binary. Maintain a working base system, but fully automate the process of going from src rpm's to installed binary rpm's. I could easily see a GPL future where instead of getting binary distributions at all one builds a binary distribution in real time from GPL sources. The issue to me is less one of whether there are other tools one can use to download files; of course there are. However, yum is by its nature an INTEGRATION tool -- it exists as a fundamental one-stop-shop interface between (hu)Man (of both sexes), Machine, and Repository. So any function that can sensibly exploit the layer of abstraction that it creates between "repository" (collection of rpm's believed to be consistent for some distribution level) and the rest is worth at least considering. This one doesn't seem that crazy to me. I'd even go it one better. "yum clone" to perfectly mirror/clone any repository (set) to which yum has access. Useful for creating backup servers/repositories. Useful for creating/mirroring new ones. Sure, rsync will do it. So will wget. Both have their OWN flaws -- the need to use multiple tools, idiosyncracies of their own, maybe access restrictions. Also, yum now supports any URI, right? rsync and wget don't necessarily work on all URI types. This would simplify the howto considerably, as a fairly major chunk of using yum as an admin in a LAN environment is creating a repository. At some point you stop making things simpler (or you start making the originally simple tool too hard to maintain and a bit gaudy). However, the real tradeoff is that using MULTIPLE tools to achieve the same work is often a lot more complex. Everything yum does could be done by the use of a few other tools (e.g. wget, rpm) and some sweat. It is just that there is a LOT of sweat because yum does a lot for you and hides complexity. rgb > > > _______________________________________________ > Yum mailing list > Yum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/mailman/listinfo/yum > -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
