[Users] New vzpkg, templates and package caching daemon

[Robert Nelson]

Kir Kolyshkin wrote:
> A few more questions to Robert (sorry for top-posting)
>
> 1. Can you explain how you deal with chicken-and-egg problem? I mean, 
> to run yum/rpm inside a VE you need to have those packages (and their 
> deps) inside the VE. In "old" vzpkg, we use external rpm/yum (vzrpm 
> and vzyum) to do that. Since you are not relying on that anymore, how 
> do you perform an initial installation of rpm/yum/their dependencies 
> in a newly created VE?
>

For creating the cache I use the standard yum/rpm on the HN.  Once a CT 
is created the yum/rpm installed in it is used.

> (My own solution to this is to have a list of URLs to a few packages 
> comprising a minimal system in which rpm could work, and then 
> download/unpack (using rpm2cpio | cpio -id) those into a newly created 
> empty container. When we can run rpm --initdb inside and do 'yum 
> install <full list of packages>". The bad thing about that is 
> (per-distro per-version list of) hard-coded package names and 
> inability to use packages from "updates" repo since they are 
> ever-changing (but packages in "base" repo should be OK).
>
> 2. Is it possible to have opensuse template metadata? AFAIK opensuse 
> lacks yum and "you" (YaST Online Updater) should be used instead.
>

I'm working on that now :-)

OpenSUSE uses rpms and supports yum, but their command line tool is 
zypper, gui is YaST.  Both YaST and zypper use yum/rpm compatible 
repositories.

The problem I've hit is a slight difference in version checking.  If you 
have a requirement that is EQ and it doesn't include a revision just a 
version then zypper accepts any revision yum barfs.

> Robert Nelson wrote:
>> Roberto Mello wrote:
>>> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 9:27 PM, Robert Nelson 
>>> <robertn at the-nelsons.org> wrote:
>>>  
>>>> I have a preliminary version of the new vzpkg utilities ready for 
>>>> testing.
>>>>
>>>> These new tools support creating templates for 32 and 64 bit 
>>>> flavours of the
>>>> following:
>>>>   Centos 4 and 5,
>>>>   Fedora 7, 8 and 9,
>>>>   Debian Sarge and Etch,
>>>>   Ubuntu Feisty, Gutsy and Hardy.
>>>>
>>>> They are extensible and will eventually support OpenSUSE and Gentoo.
>>>>     
>>>
>>> Fantastic! Thanks for doing this and for sharing. Will definitely be
>>> taking a look at this.
>>>
>>>  
>>>> In addition, I've created pkg-cacher, a transparent caching proxy 
>>>> daemon
>>>> optimized for Debian and RPM packages.  It is based on apt-cacher 
>>>> version
>>>> 1.6.4 available with Debian.  This version has been modified to 
>>>> understand
>>>> RedHat RPM repositiories.  It also adds support for the HTTP Range 
>>>> header
>>>> and deals correctly with files which have the same name but different
>>>> content on different distributions or in some cases different 
>>>> versions of
>>>> the same distribution.
>>>>     
>>>
>>> In my experience I've found that just setting up Squid and telling my
>>> different machines to use the proxy (Acquire::http::Proxy
>>> "http://proxy.hostname:3128/";) has been the best pacakge caching
>>> solution.
>>>
>>> Works accross different packaging systems too.
>>>
>>>   
>>
>> There are a few advantages of using pkg-cacher versus squid:
>>
>>     It understands the difference between packages (static content) 
>> and metadata files (dynamic content).
>>
>>     It only keeps a single copy of a package even if it is shared 
>> across multiple distributions. versions or accessed from multiple 
>> mirrors.
>>
>>     Removal of stale packages can be based on whether the package is 
>> referenced by any repositories using the metadata.
>>
>> This means less downloads and less disk usage. Even a 250 GB disk 
>> starts looking small once you deal with multiple distros, versions 
>> and mirrors :-)
>>>> In order to make installation easy I've setup repositories for 32 
>>>> and 64 bit
>>>> versions of CentOS 4, 5 and Fedora 7, 8 and 9.  I'll be producing 
>>>> packages
>>>> for Debian and Ubuntu as HN later.
>>>>     
>>>
>>> I can help with Debian packages if you need.
>>>
>>> Roberto
>>>
>>>   
>> Thanks for the offer, the only reason I didn't release it at this 
>> time is I didn't have a Debian HN set up for testing yet.  Should be 
>> available in the next day or so.
>
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