[WBEL-users] Trying to install yum on wbel 4

[Johnny Hughes]

On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 12:27 +0100, Will McDonald wrote:
> On 5/20/05, Benjamin Smith <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote:
> >        Found /etc/yum.repos.d/wbelmirrors.yum, and copied it
> > to /etc/yum.repos.d/default.repo
> > 
> >        Now, yum starts, but I get lots of errors, shown below.
> > 
> >        1) $releasever isn't getting parsed. Instead, notice the "Null" that's put
> > in, there. Just to be sure, I tried doing a search/replace for "$releasever"
> > and replaced with "4", see #2 below.
> > 
> >        2) It's looking for a "repmomd.xml". I looked thru my own yum repositories,
> > and there's no such file. Also, I've verified that there is no such file at
> > several of the listed repositories. (even when I replace the "Null" with a
> > "4" in my browser)
> > 
> >        I've already mirrored the WBEL release tree via rsync, and set up a yum
> > archive for the 2-dozen-ish servers I intend to have running WBEL 4 as soon
> > as I can get some trial testing done, but I can't install anything on my new
> > system with yum! Does the yum repo need to be set up with yum-arch version
> > 2.2? (my yum repo is currently running WBEL 3.0)
> 
> 1) This is because in /etc/yum.conf
> 
> distroverpkg=redhat-release
> 
> ... yum uses the major version number of this RPM to figure out what
> OS version it's using. From the yum.conf man page...
> 
> distroverpkg
>  The package used by yum to determine the "version" of the
> distribution. This can   be any installed package. Default is
> 'red-hat-release'.
> 
> To work properly with Whitebox it needs to be...
> 
> distroverpkg=whitebox-release
> 
> [root at localhost ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release
> White Box Enterprise Linux release 4 (manifestdestiny)
> [root at localhost ~]# rpm -q redhat-release
> package redhat-release is not installed
> [root at localhost ~]# rpm -q whitebox-release
> whitebox-release-4-2.WB2
> [root at localhost ~]#
> 
> Possibly something else worth a bug report?
> 
> And 2)
> 
> http://linux.duke.edu/projects/metadata/
> 
> Aparently yum-arch has been deprecated for createrepo, which was news
> to me too, until about half an hour ago. :)
> 
> Our local DAG repos have the new repodata/ structure in addition to
> old-style headers/, though that could be down to our nightly yum-arch.
> None of the trees we sync from ukmirror.ac.uk have repodata/. And the
> createrepo RPM isn't part of the default EL distro seemingly.

Yum 2.2.x requires the createrepo type metadata ... the up2date version
included with WBEL4 will require the old yum-arch style headers (as does
yum-2.0.x).  So, both types need to be generated for WBEL-4.
------------------------------------
Yum also now works with groups of files.  It works with xml files (like
the comps.xml on the main CD-1).  The features are:

groupinstall
groupremove 
groupupdate
groupinfo
grouplist

In a group enable a yum repo, one can do:

yum grouplist

To get all the groups...

The you could do this from a minimal install to Gnome:

yum groupinstall "X Window System" "GNOME Desktop Environment"

-----------------------------------

To enable "yum groups" for yum-2.0.x (wbel-3), you would either copy (or
ln -s) the comps.xml file to the main WBEL directory (the one that is
shows up here: http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/pub/3.0/en/os/i386/ ... also
the x86_64 one).  The new file needs to be named yumgroups.xml.  This
file needs to reside in the same directory as the headers folder for the
main distro. Nothing else should be needed for yum-2.0.x.

To enable yum groups for yum-2.2.x (wbel-4) you would need to copy the
file over (or ln -s it) into the main directory as above.  I can be
named anything ... I call it yumgroups.xml for consistency.

The you would need to build the createrepo metadata like this (from
within the main directory)

createrepo -g yumgroups.xml .

to build createrepo data in other directories, you would do this:

createrepo .
-------------------------------------------
If you have more than 1 repo ... (like a contrib repo), you can create
separate yumgroups.xml files for each repo .. and yum will add them
together.  

For example, CentOS-4 has an extras directory that contains XFCE.  There
is a separate yumgroups.xml in that repo. If you have the extras repo
enabled in your yum configuration, you can see the extra groups added
(XFCE-4.2, AptRPM) ... they look just like the others from the main
comps.xml.

Here is what that extras yumgroups.xml looks like for reference:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/extras/i386/yumgroups.xml

(it can be different per arch as well ... for example, AptRPM doesn't
work in x86_64, so it is not in that yumgroups.xml)
------------------------------------------
Hope this helps explain the (fairly) new yum capabilities.  Seth Vidal
{aka skvidal on IRC}, the yum mantainer, is also a CentOS Developer and
we rolled these into CentOS-3 and CentOS-4 (beta at the time) in January
2005. They would be a good, user friendly, addition to WBEL-3 and WBEL-4
as well.

More references can be found concerning "yum groupinstall" in the centos
mailing lists for anyone interested... a google search of:

site:centos.org "yum groupinstall"
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