Has anyone built a local update repository for 12.2...
 

...or even for an earlier version?

I'm planning to do that so that my slow internet connection will only need to download any updates once. I've already bought the base installation disk and the 12.2 repository DVDs to avoid the massive download volume -- and the insane download time. (The repository discs take about 20GB when copied to disk and I'm really glad I didn't try and download them.) The plan is for other systems on the LAN to use the hard disk copies of the CDs as well as the planned local update repository to save bandwidth.

I will likely not be installing everything in 12.2 so won't need to have room for updates for the whole set of packages. (If memory serves, the largest set of software I've selected so far used about 6GB of space during the initial installation. Or was that 6GB of compressed installation files? :) ) I've never seen any documentation that details how one plans for such a repository. Distribution size X 2? X 3? There's no information I've run across on the OpenSUSE site about what I can expect for disk space needs for update files. (If it's there it's well hidden.)

Has anyone done this and can give me an idea of how much disk space I'd need to allocate for an update repository? Any other tips are welcome as well.

TIA

--
Rick

I use an update folder for updating as I am always playing about with my system and re-installing. Currently I am using 12.3 milestone 2 and the folder size is 457 mb (257 files) but this include updates to kde 3.5 as well as packmam media stuff. My last 12.2 update folder was 937 mb (646 files) was back in September but this included updates, packman, kde updates.

The simplest way is to create an update folder, click the yast update option and manually download the packages that are required to your folder. Then simply add the folder as a repo using yast and update from there.

Thanks for the data point. That must have been for DRPMS, right? Otherwise it seems really small. If not, then I'm not so worried about needing as much disk space for the repository as I initially thought -- I was looking at allocating an 36GB mirror for the repository using a pair of older SCSI disks I have on hand. If it's less than 1GB I could just try and keep the files under /var but I recall seeing the update process on one recently built 12.2 system tell me that there were 2GB+ of updates waiting to be installed (yikes!). That's the sort of download I don't want to duplicate.
That's pretty much what I had planned and specifying the local directory with a higher priority for the updates. I'm not keen on the "manually" part of that process but you've given me an idea for a nice Winter weekend (or so) programming project.

Thanks...

Rick