What is up2date repackaging?

[James Olin Oden]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Taylor, ForrestX wrote:

> I just noticed that /var in FC Beta2 was taking up an extraordinary 
> amount of space.  I originally thought that it was /var/spool/up2date, 
> but I noticed that there was a /var/spool/repackage directory containing 
> over 1GB of rpm packages.  I do recall seeing a 'Repackaging' screen in 
> up2date, but I wasn't sure what it was doing.  Does anyone know what 
> up2date is doing?
> 
RPM for a while has supported a rollback feature which allows you to 
rollback your system to a particular set of rpms that were installed
on the system at the time you are rolling back to.  To implement this
whenever it upgrades a package, before the upgrade occurs it repackages
the current package with the bits as they are on the system at the time.
This repackaged packages goes into /var/spool/repackage by default.  
Having these repackaged packages makes it fairly easy (I have been over 
the code more times than I care to think, so it finally looks fairly
easy (-;) to roll back your system to the state it used to be in.
This is all of course a very high level look at this sparing many details.

So now you know what those repackaged rpms are for.  What I don't 
understand is why you are getting them, as to my knowledge (which is
appearantly incomplete) this feature is not on by default.  You can 
configure up2date to use it, and then of course it does the right
thing.  If you find the oldest repackaged package in /var/spool/repackage 
you can probably figure out when it was turned on on your system...but
that still won't answer if that is the default now.

> Also, I am getting the problem with up2date trying to update rpms that 
> are already installed.  I can verify that these rpms have several 
> versions installed.  I thought that this must be something to do with 
> the up2date rollbacks, because this started happening when I setup the 
> rollback option in up2date.  Did anyone bugzilla this?
>
Ahha, if I read on I will see why your getting the repackaged packages 
(-;.  Yep you turned it on so you are getting them.  

What do you mean updating rpms that are already installed?  Are 
you getting multiple instances of the exact same rpm (same name,
epoch, version, release, arch [NEVRA for short]) or do you get multiple
instances of rpms with differing EVRA's, or what do you mean?

cheers...james

P.S. Forest, if you want to see the real bleeding edge of automated 
rollbacks (and want to test it [please (-:]) check out:

	http://lee.k12.nc.us/~joden/misc/patches/rpm

Which has a patched version of rpm with my auto-rollback patch, which
automatically rollback an rpm transaction if any rpm any the transaction
fails to install.
 
> Thanks,
> 
> Forrest
>