Here are some notes I typed up this weekend on a plane and in a truly dull airport about yum changes in the upcoming test release. Here they are: Making yum repositories now: Yum repositories are no longer created by yum-arch. There is a new program, createrepo (http://linux.duke.edu/metadata/generate), that creates the metadata. The metadata for rpm packages is the information that describes the data stored in the payload of the rpm. createrepo takes the metadata from each rpm in the repository and stores it in an xml format that is simple and expedient to load the data from. This makes it easier and more efficient for yum to resolve dependencies and find out other important information about the packages a user would want to install. To create your own repository install the createrepo rpm and run: create-repo /path/to/the/packages It will recursively go through the directory you specify, find all the rpm packages, and retrieve the pertinent metadata. Once this command completes you should have a directory named 'repodata' created in the directory path you specified on the command line. The repodata directory will contain at least 4 files. They are: repomd.xml - stores the information about the other metadata files. It is a meta-metadata file. :) It has checksums and timestamps for each file of the metadata. primary.xml[.gz] - stores the critical information for listing and dependency solving packages. It is the core of information for the repository and it is normally the smallest of the files containing package metadata. filelists.xml[.gz] - stores the complete file listing for each package. It also contains some information describing the files. It distinguishes between files, directories and ghosted files in the package. other.xml[.gz] - stores any other information that is available from the package. This file is available for completeness and convenience. In particular, this file stores all the changelog information for each package. If you specified the -g option to createrepo and listed a groups file (a comps.xml format file) then this file will also be copied to the repodata directory. Yum Changes: 1. Yum will no longer work with repositories generated with yum-arch. The new format and the old format do not conlict with each other so if you want to run createrepo and yum-arch on a single repository that will work just fine. However, the new yum will not support old-style repositories and there are no plans at this time to make it possible. 2. When specifying packages on the command line and in the exclude lists you can use complete version and arch strings now. In addition to specifying: yum install mypackage you can now also specify: yum install mypackage-1.1 The following version/arch string formats are accepted: name name-ver name-ver-rel name.arch name-ver-rel.arch epoch:name-ver-rel.arch 3. The config file has been enhanced in a number of ways. Inside the config file you can now specify include=url://some/location/file at any point. This allows you to include one config file inside another. The file is included literally, as though typed in place. The include option takes any url that yum is capable of handling (http, https, ftp and file). 4. In addition to the above config change, yum also offers an optional /etc/yum.repos.d directory for configurations. Each file named with a .repo extension will be parsed and added to the set of repositories listed in the yum.conf file. The format of these files is identical to the listing of a repository in the yum.conf file: [repository-id] name=repository name baseurl=url://path/to/repository ... 5. New command line options: --obsoletes - tell yum to include obsoletes in its update processing --enablerepo=repository-id - tell yum to enable the repository of that id this option can be specified multiple times on the command line. This will override the 'enabled' option to a repository in the configuration file. --disablerepo=repository-id - The logical opposite of the above. Other new features will be added and they'll be described in more detail then. This should give users an overview of the major changed items in yum, so far. hope this helps people. -sv
