[Server-devel] Tying yum to a package "stream"?

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 4:24 PM, James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>  But if you are going to ship a repo to end users which requires/uses
> the yum-priority plugin (or excludes, or whatever),

I am shipping a heavily "preconfigured" spin, the OLPC School Server.
It points to the standard F9 repos, plus OLPCXS repos. So far we
override... 1 package: ejabberd.

> then the simple
> advise I would give you is: _don't_.

Can you tell me a bit more about why? (I definitely respect your
technical advise, I'm trying to get more depth of info / experience on
this...)

As it's a single package and this could expand to a couple more
packages but no more, one alternative is to take that single package
and rename it ejabberd-xs and set it to provide:ejabberd,
conflicts:ejabberd.

I am already down that path with Moodle ("moodle-xs"), which I plan to
maintain as a long-term heavily customised package.

>  Instead clone the Fedora repo. removing the packages you want to
> "override"

Quite a bit of work if I also want to give them access to sec updates
in a timely fashion :-) and my "conflict" with Fedora packages is
tiny.

> ... or even better get your changes into Fedora.

In some cases Fedora won't want them as they are strictly local
customisations -- such is the case of ejabberd and moodle. In others
Fedorans are looking into  integrating changes in their own timeframes
(and I have my own release schedules to work for :-/ ).

It's a classic upstream/downstream game...

cheers,



m
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