Smart 1.4.1 with Fedora 18

[Anders F Björklund]

> Hi,
>    I have now upgraded to Fedora 18 and I am having a couple of issues with Smart 1.4.1.

Hi there! It's still a mystery why Fedora insists on shipping Smart
with a "fc13.89" repository config.... Even APT got updated (to fc16) ?

Or why they don't upgrade to a newer Smart with the Yum plugin, so
they don't have to keep the configuration files updated if that's hard.

>    - In a previous email relative to Fedora 17 Anders mentioned that he didn't think base and mirror list urls could be mixed, but if both were specified the base url would be ignored and the mirror list used instead, if this is the case why does smart insist that a base url be supplied if a mirror list is specified?

The baseurl is part of how Smart does mirroring, so it's a required
field on the metadata channels. (see "smart mirror" for how it works)

>    - Relative to the above, if the mirror list is specified as the base url smart reads the raw html/xml supplied by the mirror list rather than the url's the mirror list is providing and then complains its not valid.

You can't give the mirrorlist as the baseurl, it's a different format:

https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-18&arch=x86_64

http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/18/Everything/x86_64/os/repodata/repomd.xml

The first one is a metalink, with various locations of the repodata ?

>    - Also, when I have configured smart to use the same mirror lists and url's as Yum is using, why does smart tell me there is nothing to upgrade when Yum tells me there is 83 packages to upgrade, which packagekit also told me before I even configured smart?

Supposedly, they are not looking at the same repodata. Stale mirror ?

>    - Is it possible to get the smart base url/mirror list functionality changed? For 2 of the repositories configured I would like smart to use the base url instead of the mirror list unless the base url is out of date compared the the mirror list repositories or the base url is problematic, in which case I want smart to use the mirror list instead?

But the point of using a mirror is not having to look at the baseurl...

Supposedly it could always look at the baseurl for the "repomd.xml",
and then try to use the mirrorlist for the files (and fail if needed).
It would need to grow an option to load the mirrors after the repomd.
There is no such option now, repomd use the mirrors like all repodata.

But it is supposed to choose the fastest mirror and with less errors...

There is no functionality for removing chronically out-of-date mirrors
though, so if that happens you need to either manually give them a
"penality" or even stop using the mirrorlist and go back to adding the
mirrors manually. Using the (mirrormanager) baseurl should work too...

Looking at the mirror list and picking one that works might be an option ?

But the assumption of the code is that there is a (static) baseurl
holding the original files and then a bunch of mirrors proxying that.
When there either is no baseurl whatsoever (like with Mandriva) or
when it changes based on your location (like in Fedora), results vary.

--anders