Greetings,
My company maintains Linux server appliances in the field at our client
sites. Our customer service is very high-touch -- when it's time to
upgrade the appliances, members of our client services team visit each
client in person and install the upgrade on-site. Our appliance
platform is RPM-based, and we distribute updates with yum, so "yum
update" is part of pretty much every client upgrade.
The problem we run into is that it can take upwards of an hour for all
of the RPMs to download before the upgrade actually starts. We'd rather
not have our client services team sitting around twiddling their thumbs
for an hour waiting for bits to download, so what we're like to be able
to do is to download all the RPMs in advance of the on-site client
upgrade visit. We'd like the process of doing this download to be as
straightforward as possible; in particular, we'd like our client
services folks to use yum for the download, just like they would use yum
for the update.
I know about yumdownloader, and it can certainly be made to download
packages, but it doesn't really have the "smarts" that we're looking for
-- it won't calculate which packages to download automatically a la "yum
update", and it won't put all the downloaded packages in the right
subdirectories of /var/cache/yum.
Therefore, to solve this problem, I came up with the following minimal
change to yum. It is very useful to us, and I think it will be
sufficiently useful to others that I'd like to ask you to consider
merging it into the mainline. The idea is simple: When "-D" is
specified on the command line, yum should stop what it's doing after
downloading but before installing. Our client services folks can thus
run "yum -D update" before going on-site, and then "yum update" when
they get there to do the upgrade.
The implementation is also simple :-). See the attached patch against
yum 3.2.0 (or at least the version of yum 3.2.0 that's in Fedora Core).
Thanks,
Jonathan Kamens
--- config.py~ 2007-05-16 23:25:51.000000000 -0400
+++ config.py 2007-06-17 19:54:58.000000000 -0400
@@ -613,6 +613,7 @@
yumconf.yumvar = yumvars
yumconf.uid = 0
yumconf.cache = 0
+ yumconf.downloadonly = 0
yumconf.progess_obj = None
# propagate the debuglevel and errorlevel values:
--- yum.8.orig 2007-06-18 00:36:27.000000000 -0400
+++ yum.8 2007-06-18 00:36:07.000000000 -0400
@@ -174,6 +174,10 @@
.IP "\fB\-C\fP"
Tells yum to run entirely from cache - does not download or update any
headers unless it has to to perform the requested action.
+.IP "\fB\-D\fP"
+Tells yum to stop after downloading packages into the cache but before
+installing them. This allows you to prime the cache for a later install
+or update.
.IP "\fB\-\-version\fP"
Reports the \fByum\fP version number and exits.
.IP "\fB\-\-installroot=root\fP"
--- cli.py~ 2007-05-16 23:25:51.000000000 -0400
+++ cli.py 2007-06-17 20:14:01.000000000 -0400
@@ -346,7 +346,12 @@
# unset the sigquit handler
signal.signal(signal.SIGQUIT, signal.SIG_DFL)
-
+
+ if self.conf.downloadonly == 1:
+ self.verbose_logger.log(yum.logginglevels.INFO_2,
+ 'Exiting after successful download')
+ sys.exit(0)
+
self.initActionTs() # make a new, blank ts to populate
self.populateTs(keepold=0) # populate the ts
self.ts.check() #required for ordering
@@ -1114,6 +1119,8 @@
# if not root then caching is enabled
if opts.cacheonly or self.base.conf.uid != 0:
self.base.conf.cache = 1
+ if opts.downloadonly:
+ self.base.conf.downloadonly = 1
if opts.obsoletes:
self.base.conf.obsoletes = 1
@@ -1194,6 +1201,9 @@
self.add_option("-C", "", dest="cacheonly",
action="store_true", default=False,
help="run entirely from cache, don't update cache")
+ self.add_option("-D", "", dest="downloadonly",
+ action="store_true", default=False,
+ help="download without installing")
self.add_option("-c", "", dest="conffile", action="store",
default='/etc/yum/yum.conf', help="config file location",
metavar=' [config file]')
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