Re: Building a multi-OS install ISO image?

Thomas Lange <[email protected]> writes:

>     > Isn’t rinse already doing the heavy lifting in donwloading all specified
>     > packages?  Createrepo then creates the metadata for a directory full of
>     > existing RPMs:
> rinse does no resolve dependencies.

I’ve looked into this: there is a program "repotrack" (available as part
of the Debian yum-utils package).  This tool takes the name of a RPM
package on the commandline and will download the package and all
dependencies from a configured RPM repo into a given directory.  So we can
do this in a loop for all packages identified by install_packages.
Finally we call "createrepo" (from the Debian package of the same name) to
turn the RPM files into a valid yum repo.

Attached is proof of concept script "fai-mirror-rpm".  It expects a valid
repo configuration in /etc/yum.repos.d as used with RPM based
distributions.

Currently unsolved issues:

* for multiple operating systems we would need different repo configs in
  /etc/yum.repos.d and a way to tell repotrack the correct ones.  There is
  an option for that but the script currently does not handle this case.

* Yum has a concept of package groups (in my FAI scripts/hooks I do a "yum
  groupinstall core" or "yum groupinstall minimal-environment" to install
  the base system).  The repo created by "createrepo" can only create
  a groups-enabled repo by providing a file in XML format on the
  commandline.  Without this the repo has no data for yum to decide which
  packages belong to a group.  So this would have to be solved to be able
  to use package groups during the installation.

Maybe this can be a starting point if somebody wants to do more work on
the topic.



-- 
Stefan