Smart config file parsing

[Cliff Wells]

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 08:55 +0200, Anders F Björklund wrote:
> Cliff Wells wrote:
> 
> >> You don't need variables.  Think about it:  when was the last time  
> >> you
> >> needed to alter those values ($releasever and $basearch) on an
> >> existing system?
> >
> > I have to alter them every single time I install a system.  I copy the
> > values from the YUM config and find/replace all the variables.  Not a
> > huge task, but a task nonetheless.
> 
> I upgrade the "smart-config" virtual package, which has the channel
> configuration for Smart - and gets generated with @VER@ and @ARCH at .
> So the variables are used once, when generating the config package,
> but then they stay the same - until configuration is updated again.
> 
> The configuration and mirrors work differently in Smart than in Yum,
> but that fortunately doesn't mean one has to do everything manually...

Except that the smart-config virtual package only includes the default
channels.  I don't know of many people who don't add more repositories
(my laptop must have at least six non-standard ones).  

Again, the manual editing isn't a huge issue, but I think that
pretending it's totally useless is rather myopic.   It's only useless to
those who don't want to use it.  

> > Because Smart and YUM use the same repositories, being able to use the
> > same syntax to describe those repositories makes sense.
> 
> You can use the yumchannelsync plugin*, if you want it to pick up
> changes made to the yum .repo files (similar to aptchannelsync) ?
> It knows about the $releasever and $basearch variables too, and
> which parts of the Yum repo configuration to skip over for Smart.
> 
> * just for reference it was at http://tracker.labix.org/issue350

Yep, I've been using it for the past several days and am quite happy
with it =)  I'm hoping it will make it into the Fedora release soon.
I hadn't actually realized it supported variables.

Cliff