Missing yum repository for RPM snapshot builds

[Samuli Seppänen]

Fedora, Redhat, CentOS and many other RPM-based distributions use the ​Yum package manager to distrubute software. Once RPM snapshots are available, yum repositories should be setup to allow testing the packages more easily.

[David Sommerseth]

A reference: ​http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2007/01/howto-creating-your-own-yum-rpm.html

Quick steps - purely guessed:

• Copy RPMs into a directory on a web server, preferably separated with a separate directory per CPU architecture (x86, i686)
• install createrepo
• cd repo root directory and do: createrepo .

Repository config for clients will then be something like:

# file /etc/yum.repos.d/openvpn-testing.repo
[openvpn-testing]
name=OpenVPN testing package repository
baseurl=http://www.example.com/path/to/repo-root/$basearch
gpgcheck=0
metadata_expire=7d

We could also sign the RPMs. Then we should package our public signing key as an RPM which will place the public key in /etc/pki/rpm-gpg. Then the repo file can be modified with gpgcheck=1. It's also possible then to ship the openvpn-testing.repo in the same RPM. Users would then just need to install this RPM and they're set to start with yum install of openvpn stuff.

It *might* be we also need to create different repos for different distros, especially if we want to support RHEL5 based stuff. Currently Fedora and RHEL6 bases are pretty close, but Fedora moves quickly forward.

[David Sommerseth]

Quick how-to on signing RPMs: ​http://fedoranews.org/tchung/gpg/

[Samuli Seppänen]

Any number of RPM repositories can now be created in automated fashion.

[Samuli Seppänen]

Yum repos now available.