Getting source RPMs with yumdownloader
In theory, the yumdownloader
program that is part of the yum-utils
package will download the source RPMs if you want it to. In practice I
spent a long time having it not work on my Fedora Core 6 machines, until
I read yet another bland bit of advice telling me to use it and decided
to figure out just what was going on.
(The problem was quite frustrating, because yumdownloader
never
complained; it just silently did nothing.)
It turns out that the trick is that you need to specifically enable
the source repositories; these are not enabled by default. At least
in Fedora Core 6, the names of these repositories are core-source
,
updates-source
, and extras-source
(for the core, core updates,
and Fedora Extras respectively). Unless you already know where an
RPM package comes from, you might as well enable all three.
And I have to praise the Fedora Wiki's guide on how to rebuild kernel
RPMs. Not only is it
a useful guide to building kernel RPMs, but without it I wouldn't have
been pushed into figuring out what was up with yumdownloader
.
(I do suggest using quilt to put together patches instead of their more brute-force approach.)
Sidebar: why yumdownloader
is silent when this happens
Yumdownloader
's silence in this case is probably a bug, and it's sort
of an interesting one. The normal process complains if a command line
argument cannot be mapped into one or more RPMs. However, when you ask
for source RPMs there is an additional step to map the RPMs found for
each command line argument into their source RPM, and this mapping code
doesn't check to see if it wound up with any source RPMs.
(I suspect that the yumdownloader
developers have the source RPM
repositories enabled by default.)
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