[Users] New vzpkg, templates and package caching daemon

[Robert Nelson]

Robert Nelson wrote:
> Kir Kolyshkin wrote:
>> (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.

Well I spent the day and a half working on OpenSUSE, what a frustration.

OpenSUSE 11.0 introduced an incompatible compression scheme (LZMA) into 
rpm. 

OpenSUSE doesn't have separate repositories for i386 and x86_64 so yum 
installs packages based on the architecture of the machine it is running 
on, not the target.  Building an i386 template actually creates an 
x86_64 one on an x86_64 HN.  This can be overridden using 
/etc/rpm/platform but it doesn't respect --installroot.

As a result of the above I have OpenSUSE 10.X templates that mostly work 
for both 32 and 64 bit.  There are still issues with the init scripts 
not running.  I think this is due to OpenSUSE's reliance on starting 
everything from bootwait, but I haven't spent a lot of time looking into 
it.  Manually running "service network start" works fine.  Also vzctl 
stop doesn't work properly.  You need to do a vzctl exec <n> halt from 
another window to make the CT actually go away.  Same thing running 
shutdown from within the CT.  Once again I haven't spent a bunch of time 
investigating.  Tools such as zypper work fine within the container.

I'm not sure what to do about 11.X.  It is possible to install a 10.3 
system and then upgrade it to 11.

I expect OpenSUSE support is a project for someone with more of a need 
for OpenSUSE and a lot more patience than I :-)