[Mageia-discuss] cauldron special install (advices needed)

[Juergen Harms]

This is a good concept - I am using something similar since about 10 
years. I started off doing it with rsync. But the rsync mirrors kept 
growing scarce - and the sites made noises like: plain users undesired, 
rsync is mainly for mirror downloads. Recently there appears to be 
movement back to rsync (servers now having more memory?)

I am now using ftp (an lftp client) and urpmi --noclean, moving package 
files (scripts) to my local repository directories after the initial 
download, and having the leaves of theses directories configured as 
file://... resources for ulteriour installs.

In case you stick to rsync, you might be interested in rpmsync - was 
available on Mandriva, I think presently not on Mageia: rpmsync knows 
about versions of packages and could, if my memory is right, destroy 
obsoleted versions - for rsync they are just files and stay; but you can 
easily make a script that purges obsoleted package files with obsoleted 
versions).

If you intend to use a local mirror for downloaded packages beyond an 
initial just "look and see" period, put some thought into how you 
organise your local repository. Mine (for Mageia 1) looks like

/repository/Mageia/1/core/updates (/repository is on a shared non-OS 
filesystem)

and so forth - for instance I can presently use 
".../cauldron/core/release" in place of ".../1/core/release"  (when the 
downloaded packages are moved from /var/cache/urpmi/rpms, I sort them 
into a directory tree that looks like a Mageia repository tree - not 
strictly necessary, but keeps things structured and tidy. I used this 
scheme when I was distro-hopping checking what could replace Mandriva 
(for instance, worked nicely with Fedora), the move from Mandriva to 
Mageia only required minor changes of the scripts.

To avoid misunderstandings: I do not keep a full local mirror, I just 
mirror the packages I really use (in the past, at the end of the 6-month 
life of a Mandriva release, the repository branch for a version took 
between 500 and 1000 MBytes - my Cauldron repository presently has 1,2 
Gigabytes - but I did not do a purge for a long time).

Good luck! Juergen