[Mageia-dev] [patch] use urpmi without root privileges to just download packages

Mon Oct 29 13:03:50 CET 2012

Hello list.
+
+I'm trying to port febootstrap to mageia (I need libguestfs, and it's a 
+mandatory dependency). I need to be able to resolve dependencies and 
+download packages, without root privileges. I see two solutions here:
+
+1) use 'urpmq --requires-recursive --sources' first to get the list of 
+packages, then check against already installed packages, then use 
+another tool (curl, wget, whatever) to download the missing ones.
+
+2) modify urpmi to allow it to be used without root privileges to just 
+download files.
+
+I'm currently trying to achieve solution 2. The attached patch relax the 
+process uid check when --no-install option is used, provided an explicit 
+download directory is used, through --download-all option. However, I'm 
+facing multiple issues here:
+
+- first, --download-all doesn't just change download-directory, its main 
+effect is to change urpmi behaviour from interleaved download/install 
+steps to download everything first. It doesn't matter very much here, 
+but distinct --download-all and --download-dir options would have been a 
+clearer interface.
+
+- second, --noclean seems to be useless when using something an 
+alternative download directory
+
+- last, the default downloader (aria, I presume) doesn't specify which 
+files it is currently downloading, meaning I'll have to post-process 
+download directory to retrieve the list of packages, whereas I'd 
+prefered to just parse urpmi output. I had to use --downloader wget to 
+get a more verbose output.
+
+urpmi maintainer(s) opinion welcome here.
+-- 
+BOFH excuse #268:
+
+Neutrino overload on the nameserver
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