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

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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There already exist a plugin in yum-utils called 'downloadonly' there 
does exactly what you want, i make yum bail out when it have downloaded 
the packages in the Transaction. The plugin add a '--downloadonly' 
option to yum.

Tim

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