Re: Proposed change: add "-D" to download without installing

i quite like the idea, is this the right place to have the right people
notified though? is there not a yum development list?
i have also been wanting to use yum to download only at times.

On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 00:37 -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
> 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
> 
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-- 
Hiren Patel

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