location of source rpms

[Christoph Thiel]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Andreas Bach Aaen wrote:

> > > Now how do I locate the matching source rpms?
> >
> > Which distribution and which channel type is that?
> 
> I use SUSE SLES10. This means that the installation CDs/DVD are in yast2 
> format, while the updated rpm can be fetched via a script called yup, 
> which provide the updates in rpm-md (yum?) format. 

Exactly.


> In SLES9 the updates where provided in a special yast format, but this 
> is changed now. Strange that they only did this for the updates and not 
> for the instalation CDs.

At the time we decided about the metadata type on the media there wasn't 
really any option to use rpm-md on multiple medias (more and 1 CD/DVD). In 
addition to that, the yast2 format is much cheaper in terms of memory 
utilization.


> > Unfortunately, you might be unlucky for several reasons:
> >
> > - smart does not support source packages as far as I know;
> 
> Right. I just hopes that there was a toolset besides it, just as there 
> are for yum.

Right :(


> > - some channel types do not associate binary packages and source 
> >   packages with each other.
> 
> That's a problem - and generally a unfortunate limitation. As both rpm 
> files and deb files provide information about their source package, 
> repositories should help with a structure to make these available. I 
> surely hope that the repository types that supports location of source 
> packages as well will survive in the stong Open Source competition.
> 
> Meanwhile I probably need to make a special script for handling this. 
> However it would be very helpfull if smart could provide me with a list 
> of (source rpm URL, channel name or repository type). Providing the 
> channel name will require that my script should be able to locate and 
> parse the channel files as well, ehile providing the repository type 
> will make my script able to locate the relative path to the source rpms. 
> Maybe the root directory of the repository is needed as well, so the 
> appropriate metadata files can be read.
> 
> In the case of yum, you have an utillity that can fetch the source rpm 
> for you: yumdownloader --source <rpm name>


Best,
Christoph