Sunday, April 02, 2006

Generating Yast Installation sources for SuSE

"Plain Cache Sources

A Plain Cache source is a directory containing RPM files. For YaST to recognize a directory as plain cache source, you must create a file (IS_PLAINcache) that contains the RPM header information of the available RPM packages. YaST needs the package data (name, version, dependencies, etc.) from the .rpm file in order to avoid reading the file over and over again. For large packages, this would result in extremely long transfer times, even if you do not want to install the package. Therefore, the needed package data is extracted from the packages and stored in a file.

This file can be create with the genIS_PLAINcache utility, which is included in the package yast2-packagemanager starting from SUSE LINUX 9.0.
Advantages

* Easy to generate

Disadvantages

* Source RPMs (src.rpm) are not supported
* Multiple architectures (i586, i686, noarch, ppc, etc.) are not supported
* No description of the installation source in YaST
* genIS_PLAINcache is a binary (not a script) that only runs on SUSE systems

Example

You have a directory with a number of binary RPM files on your server and want to make it available as YaST installation source via HTTP or FTP.

Run the following commands in order to generate a plain cache source:

cd /srv/www/htdocs/suse/RPMS/
genIS_PLAINcache -f -r .
gzip genIS_PLAINcache

Subsequently, you can add the directory as installation source in YaST -> Change Source of Installation. Note the restrictions mentioned above"

You can read more HERE

No comments: