On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Clif Smith wrote: > Reply-To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > > To elaborate more on my scenario... When we're ready to begin QA, I > grab all of the latest appropriate RPMs for our environment via up2date > on RHN and store them in a central repository. Ok having a QA process is good. > So, within that repository, I've got a set of updates, > including their dependencies, from which I can build systems > tailored for the version of our product we need to QA against. Reading between the lines it sounds to me as if you want a set of local redistribution resources that up2date/yum can pull from. So start with a directory full of the basic system and all the interesting updated rpms you can get your hands on. Some may need to be downloaded by hand (http/ftp). Next build a parallel directory and make symbolic links from the master dir such that the new dir is populated with a specific subset of files to represent a testing context. Next enable the dir as ftp/http resource that yum/up2date can interact with. This way yum/up2date will not jump and pass over some rpm of interest to the QA process because a 'newer' version is visible to it. If you do it correctly a long list of various configurations that have no illegal dependencies will be possible. Further you will notice illegal collections of rpms as you attempt to update! Next on a minimum baseline system configure up2date/yum to look at this dir and give up2date/yum a launch. This should result in a reproduceable software configuration for testing. Some config files may need to be script updated. You might automate the population of these parallel dirs with a script that gets data from the output of "rpm -qa" (see /var/log/rpmpkgs). This can make it easy to build another one just like the last one. Such an automated process could be general enough to accept an rpmpkgs list from a customer and let your QA/service folks effectively clone that specific situation. By keeping good notes you will be able to do a binary search and find out when a problem 'rpm' arrived should a 'new' bug report generate a new test. Summary: look into yum and stick with rpm. Regards, TomM BTW: If this is nVidia please fix the Mesa interaction. -- T o m M i t c h e l l mitch48 -a*t- yahoo-dot-com
