I have been fiddling with Dorrie lately. Dorrie is a web interface to create Fedora spins, remixes and installation media. But working with Dorrie requires one to have a Fedora repository at disposal if one has to build Live ISOs. I rule the possibility of downloading packages from the internet for testing. You need to have a local repository for testing it in a nice and efficient way. I tried to create a dummy Fedora repository with 0-byte .rpm files and tried to mock livecd-creator, but I failed. I forgot that livecd-creator installs the packages during the process of creating a Live ISO. Nevertheless, this attempt was not without any result. I fixed and updated Dorrie’s code to handle offline repositories.
Now, we (I and sayan) are working on another feature for Dorrie: building installation media (just like Fedora installation DVD). We are using pungi for the purpose. If my calculations are correct, then building an installation media leaves an option to use 0-byte .rpm files. But, this is not the topic of this post 
. I will talk on how to create a dummy Fedora repository.
Fedora repositories mainly have two important components for a Fedora version: releases and updates. All files in the dummy repository can’t be fake, the metadata files have to be there for real, otherwise the packages names won’t be found. I have devised a shell script for creating such a dummy repository.
#!/bin/bash # Destination directory DESTDIR="dummy_repo/" # RSYNC URL URL="rsync://fedora.c3sl.ufpr.br/fedora/linux/releases/16/" #file extensions to be touched FILE_EXTENSIONS_PATTERN=".*\.rpm$\|.*\.iso$\|.*\.img$" #patterns to exclude from rsync EXCLUDE_PATTERN="--exclude=source/ --exclude=debug/ --exclude=repoview/ --exclude=x86_64 --exclude=Everything/ --exclude=Live/" #This will create only the directories and 0-byte .iso and .rpm files #Since the files created will have newer timestamp, when we run #rsync for real, the .iso and .rpm files won't be downloaded rsync -auvr $URL $DESTDIR --dry-run $EXCLUDE_PATTERN | while read line; do if [ `expr match "$line" ".*/$"` -ne 0 ]; then echo $line mkdir -p $DESTDIR/$line elif [ `expr match "$line" "$FILE_EXTENSIONS_PATTERN"` -ne 0 ]; then echo $line touch $DESTDIR/$line fi done #Download metadata files rsync -auvr $URL $DESTDIR $EXCLUDE_PATTERN --progress
This is just a sample code. The above code can be customized to do more versatile dummy cloning of Fedora repositories.
