urpmi without internet connection

[adamw]

yinyeti: are you sure you're using the *synthesis* files? There's two types of package lists for urpmi. The synthesis are the small ones. They're about 300KB for main and contrib, which is pretty small even for a 56k modem. You may be using the *big* ones, which are the hdlists - these contain much more information and are about 20MB each. If you're using these ones, you should remove and re-add the sources and point them at the synthesis.hdlist files instead of the hdlist files. (If you use easyurpmi, there's a little checkbox which says 'use synthesis files' or something like that).

 

If you use the /official directories on the mirrors, they shouldn't change - even contrib. The trees in /official are frozen. The only directory whose contents will change will be /updates. If you use the Community directories - /devel/10.0 , /devel/10.1 - these may change over time, yes. If they do change and the hdlists no longer match, you run:

 

urpmi.update -a

 

which gets the new hdlists.

 

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the official 'newer' version, unless again you're using Community, where things do get updated over time. If a new version of something is put in Community and it specifically requires a newer version of something else, that's almost always a genuine dependency, it wouldn't be added if it would work flawlessly with the older version. However, if you used Official, you wouldn't run into this problem, as the Official tree is (as I said) frozen and will be identical to the Official CDs. You'd only see urpmi attempting to get a newer version if it had been released as an official update, in which case you really do want the newer version; official updates are only released to fix serious bugs or security holes, both of which I imagine you'd want to have fixed.

 

You can keep the files downloaded by urpmi using the --noclean option. urpmi --noclean whatever . The files will be saved in /var/cache/urpmi/rpms .

 

Hope that was helpful!

 

In conclusion, yes, rpmfind is not too harmful if you use it carefully like you do, checking the MDK version. However, I don't like to see it recommended too freely, as then people will use it and *not* be careful, and start installing packages from different MDK versions, from Cooker or even from different distributions, which will rapidly break things. And you can get all the benefits of using rpmfind carefully through pbone, or urpmi.

[corticalhomunculus]

I depend on rpmfind, and haven't ever had any problems with it, all i do is sift down my search to "mandrake 10.1" and have never gotten the wrong or broken package. The fact that it tells me what dependencies I need is also a godsend, I should note: not only do i not have broadband I don't have DIALUP. That just happens to be available to me down the road wheras I have to go 20 miles away to access broadband. In a few cases, yes, faking an urpmi to disk and then burning all the crap it gives me makes sense, but if I can find it in an rpm why would I bother?

Even if I did break down and have a phone line installed I probobly would continue hitting up rpms for the size/time reasons mentioned by yinyeti. It's the difference between getting what you need, along with a bunch of other stuff or getting only exactly what you need. Big difference on dialup where a few 300k files means an extra half hour of your life is gone and you'll never get it back.

[adamw]

um, AFAIK, the 'rpm' command, the 'urpmi' command and rpmfind's system will all give you the exact same dependencies, as they all work from the same information within the package itself. The package tells the package manager what dependencies it needs, so as long as you're using the same package, you'll need the same dependencies whether you're using urpmi or grabbing the RPMs manually.

[theYinYeti]

Thanks adamw !

That was really helpful. I'll have to see to urpmi again. Maybe last time I tried, synthetisis files did not exist yet (I was using 8.2 or 9.1 then).

There still remains the problem of updated repositories (I'm thinking about a Java/urpmi repository I saw once, for use with Apache products in particular), but your post answers this too.

In short, given your very detailed answer, I only have two questions left:

- Does rpmdrake have something equivalent to -noclean?

- Is it possible to have rpmdrake (or at least urpmi) do the download AND keep the files in cache (noclean), BUT not install them, if they're to be installed on another PC?

 

Yves.

[adamw]

first question - not sure. I hardly ever use rpmdrake :). --noclean might work on rpmdrake, I'm not going to vouch for it though.

 

second question - urpmi --test --noclean should do this.