Arch Linux

muflax

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2008-07-21

Posts: 58

keeping a local repo

For some time now I've been using a local repo (~60 packages), of which about half are only customized builds of official packages or version bumps because I'm impatient. The problem of doing this is that I've not yet found a non-annoying way of doing this without getting outdated packages.

Possible solutions:

a) building and installing with makepkg -i
Problem: pacman complains about newer packages. As I use so many, these warning are annoying and useless.

b) using a local repo
Problem: You either put your repo first or last in pacman.conf.
If it's first, you don't get informed of updates.
If it's last, you get the silly warnings again.

c) handling it yourself
Problem: Why am I using the official repos then at all? I might as well update everything myself and switch to LFS.

Now, I can patch out the warnings per option or change pacman's algorithm for finding outdated packages, but before I do something like this, it'd probably be a better idea to ask for ideas first.
Is there a simpler way? If not, would somebody else be interested in either a pacman patch or new wrapper to handle this situation?

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: keeping a local repo

You could use pkgrel=0  when you do versions bumps of packages for your local repo.  This way when the package in the official repo will be updated pacman will update it autoomatically.

muflax

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2008-07-21

Posts: 58

Re: keeping a local repo

This doesn't really work for me. The problem is that I use the repo to synchronize several machines. If I use lower pkgrels (of the form old_pkgrel.new_pkgrel, with old_pkgrel = 0 for version bumps), pacman doesn't properly detect updates. If I put the local repo first, it doesn't notice new official versions, and if I put it last, it doesn't update my own new builds.

Either way, I will have to tell all other machines of new versions by hand.

Edit: The real problem here is that pacman uses the first package over all other packages, totally ignoring the version number. That way you can not have several repos with mixed up-to-date-ness.

A quick hack would be using two local repos - one for custom builds and new packages, and one for version bumps. But I don't like this so far.

Edit 2: I've been thinking about this a while and talked it over with a friend. A few tests have shown that patching pacman introduces breakage and unnecessary bloats the process. The current idea is using a wrapper that is basically a package management preprocessor. I'm thinking about something like this:

0) empty the local repo
1) pacman -Sy
2) check all packages in $LOCAL, printing a warning if there is a newer version available (with a higher major pkgrel, so that minors can be used locally) and otherwise putting the package in the local repo
3) normal pacman -Syu with the local repo as first
4) ...
5) profit!

Things would be significantly easier if the repos were a git repo, but oh well.

Last edited by muflax (2009-04-20 15:34:14)