Creating an installation source for YaST
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Q:
What do I have to do if I want to create an installation source for YaST?
A:
You have a couple of choices. There are two types of installation sources for YaST, plain cache and "real" YaST sources.
A Plain Cache source is a directory containing RPM files. For YaST to recognize a directory as plain cache source, you must create a file (IS_PLAINcache) that contains the RPM header information of the available RPM packages. YaST needs the package data (name, version, dependencies, etc.) from the .rpm file in order to avoid reading the file over and over again. For large packages, this would result in extremely long transfer times, even if you do not want to install the package. Therefore, the needed package data is extracted from the packages and stored in a file.
A "real" YaST source consists of several files and directories that describe the installation source and its content: binary RPM files for various architectures and the respective source RPM files. Some of the descriptive files can be generated with the create_package_descr script, which is available in the package autoyast2-utils starting from SUSE Linux 9.0.
For complete instructions on how to set both of these up, see this article.
Also, further documentation regarding the YaST installation sources is available in the package yast2-packagemanager-devel.
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