[Novalug] Fedora Repos

[Jason Kohles]

I use this trick for enabling certain repos from kickstart, while doing
system builds (if the system will be shipped to a remote site then we want
the internet-facing repos to be configured, but we want to use local
mirrors while we build it, so that it's fast)..

I create a repo file called 'bootstrap.repo' that contains repos named
'bootstrap-os', 'bootstrap-updates', 'boostrap-epel' that point to local
mirrors of the appropriate repos.

Then I create a yum function to override what actually happens when yum
runs:

function yum() {
    /usr/bin/yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=bootstrap-\* "$@"
}

-- 
Jason Kohles
Palantir Technologies | UNIX Systems Engineer
jkohles at palantir.com  | 703.957.5784







On 11/17/11 1:50 PM, "James Ewing Cottrell 3rd" <JECottrell3 at Comcast.NET>
wrote:

  All True.

One technique is to put certain repos into /etc.yum.repos.d with
'enabled=0' in each stanza.

Then do things like:

yum --enablerepo=whatever this that the-other

in certain install scripts.

I had to do that recently to get DRBD out of the CentOS Extras repo on
RHEL 5.

I am surprised it wasn't in EPEL, but perhaps DRBD is out of favor?

JIM

On 11/14/2011 1:24 PM, Peter Larsen wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-11-14 at 10:45 -0500, greg pryzby wrote:
>> Safe? as safe as any non-official Fedora repo. The owner knows the
>> rule and should play by them. NVidia, Adobe, Google, and others offer
>> repos to play nice.
>>
>> The question is more 'free vs non-free' than 'safe'. If the packages
>> are signed and you install the key, it is 'safe' from bad hackers (or
>> should be).
> While I rarely find occasions where I disagree with Greg - this is
> probably one of them. Safe may be the wrong word - but there are risks
> involved. Independent repos can overlap and conflict. They're not tested
> at the same time, so at any point in time you may be the first to get a
> certain combination down and things will not work. Other risks that
> libraries being updated by the 3rd party repo overrides a tested version
> and causes other packages unrelated not to work, or your update fails
> because of the version dependency.
>
> 3rd party repos needs to be used with care. Let me point out that I do
> run with quite a few of them myself. There is of course the free vs.
> non-free question but in many cases, it's either a license issue or
> about certain products not following Fedora standards and haven't been
> adopted into the official repos.
>
> This is an important point - it's not really hard to get into the Fedora
> repo. You need a sponsor of a project, and the project needs to follow
> certain guidelines. It also has to use the right license terms GPLv2 I
> think is minimum requirement these days. Most FOSS projects are already
> at that level - and the hardest part is getting a sponsor, someone
> who'll be in charge of keeping the project up to date on Fedora. Bottom
> line, if a project is not part of Fedora's official repos you need to
> stop and think.
>
> There are a few other plugins that will benefit you when you mix and
> match repos. One is called yum-plugin-priorities. This allows "fedora"
> to win, if there are conflicts. It can prevent bad replacement of key
> Fedora parts. Another is yum-plugin-protectbase.
>
> I'm not saying do not use alternative repos. I'm saying use them with
> great consideration. The golden rule I would follow if Fedora is new to
> me, is use only repos that are being mentioned at the official fedora
> site. RPMFusion is mentioned and as long as you just use the components
> being talked about on FedoraFAQ (etc) you should be fine. But do be
> aware that things _can_ break when you use less official sources with
> Fedora.

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