How to save your rpm's for future reuse in Mandriva. p1 of 10

	How to save your rpm's for future reuse in Mandriva. By Glenn Waller 28th April 2010.

	Why did I decide to reuse the downloaded rpm's (Redhat Package Management)?
To save time, connectivity problems (Internet) Bandwidth and embarrassment after I broke the system. I have added my scripts with explanations to the end of this paper but they are customised for my system, so read and edit them before trying to use them. ;-)

	How I started reusing the saved rpm's.
Including, Mandriva installation choice of copying the data to HD, before the package selection process, was saved in /var/ftp/pub/mandriva(ver)...

	Mostly, back then it was for large packages that I would reuse, such as the kernel-source (50Mb, approx) and the plf (Mandriva's Penguin Liberation Front) rpm's for video codecs.

	Then I found genhdlist and soon after genhdlist2, and wrote a bunch of commands to a text-file and made a shell script out of it.

	I partitioned my hard-drives to give me some space that would not be formatted during an install, Mandy generally requires formatting of /usr and / (root). This maybe a GNU/Linux requirement across the board of the many distributions (distros)

	After I found genhdlist2 was I able to usefully add my local repositions (repos) to darkRPM, to make them available when using smart-packager and urpm(i), And reuse them at will, regardless of when I broke it and, and keep  moving forward.

	Using the no-clean hack in the GUI has never been reliable on my system, as it seems to reset it's self after each invocation of the program. So I took a different track, I wanted to save the rpms while at the same time being able to view the selected packages and dependencies (deps) before committing to the changes.

	So, I would painstakingly copy and paste the confirmation text from Drakrpm to a plain text file and remove the new-line and dash+space at the beginning of each new line to create a space separated list that urpmi could work with. After the copy and paste and before running the list with urpmi –noclean  I would close Drakrpm cancelling the process, but my list of packages was safe, and usable.

	I still have not figured out how to keep the signatures for the packages, although I have tried using some guides from the web. But I guess if they were fine when initially downloaded, they'll still be fine unless I get a hard-drive error, which has not occurred for quite some time (Fingers crossed).

	The list was generally discarded after use, generally because of the gross amount of redundant files I would end up with, sometimes it would take upto an hour to edit the list (1340 odd packages, lines) so I've been hunting for a way to make this more expedient and reliable. And I found sed.

	Editing the list was accomplished from the bottom to the top, so I was not continually working at the end of the line, but the beginning of the line to save scrolling, with the mouse to high-light the characters I wanted/needed to remove and the space bar. 
“Two hands, two guns!” (sifu Malcolm Sue)