Re: Installing yum/createrepo to private dir on Ubuntu

On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 18:05 -0400, Greg Ward wrote:
> I am starting to maintain a collection of yum repositories on an
> Ubuntu machine.  (Most of our workstations are Red Hat-ish, hence yum.
>  I like Debian and Ubuntu, so that's what the server is running.)  So
> I figured I would need a "private" copy of a recent version of
> createrepo somewhere near the repositories.  (By "private" I just mean
> "not in /usr/bin", not "nobody else can run it".)
> 
> (Incidentally, an old version of createrepo, 0.4.6, is packaged for my
> Ubuntu version (feisty, 7.04), I *could* just "apt-get install
> createrepo".  But that's so ... so ... uninteresting.  Easy, even.
> And I'm hoping more recent versions are faster.)
> 
> I have had a number of problems getting this working.  Some are
> cultural, like I expect a README file to tell me what other packages
> are required to get this package working.  I just figured out "look in
> the spec file, stupid", and indeed, there they are.  I would suggest
> adding a sentence to both yum and createrepo's README files along the
> lines of "look in the spec file, stupid".  Will happily provide
> patches.
> 
> (On reflection, I think it would be nice to have more details in the
> README: when someone is building from source, they are more likely to
> have to go dig up sources for required packages.  For example, yum
> imports gpgme with no explanation -- apart from a "Requires" line in
> the spec file -- of what gpgme is or how I satisfy that dependency.  I
> had to boot up a vmware of an FC7 machine, run "yum install pygpgme",
> and follow the URL in the installed package.  Ouch!  It would have
> been much easier if the URL had been in yum's README in the first
> place.  Or INSTALL, whatever.)
> 
> Also, I don't understand why createrepo needs 400+ lines of make in
> four Makefiles.  I just wrote a 6-line setup.py that does 80% of what
> "make install" does, and I think I could add the remaining 20% pretty
> easily.  Is there a reason yum and createrepo use make instead of
> distutils?  If not, I'll happily provide setup scripts too.
> 
> Anyways.  I am getting closer, but have not pulled it off yet.  Let me
> know if you want those patches.  And remind me to write up how I pull
> this off, if in fact I do.  ;-)
> 

Hi Greg,
 Thanks for your depiction of things. If you have patches to createrepo
- please send them to the rpm-metadata list - on this same server. We'll
take a look at them and see what's what.

thanks,
-sv