How to save your rpm's for future reuse in Mandriva. p1 of 10
Posted 05-11-2010 at 11:58 PM by GlennsPref
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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)
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