About the current state of the Yum package in Lenny

[Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr>]

Hi,

Even though Debian is not RPM based, it's very important to have a
working Yum package in Debian, just to be able to setup all sorts of yum
based distribution in a chroot for setting-up VMs.

Unfortunately, it seems that the current maintainer of Yum in Debian
haven't been active for a long time, and the current package in Lenny is
simply not working. I consider that having a non-working yum package in
Debian Lenny is a grave regression.

With a little bit of communication, I've been able to make a working yum
package, and I could setup a CentOS on a Xen dom0 Lenny server. Please
read this:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=496137

Having yum working means that we need the python-iniparse and
python-gpgme packages (which will both reach SID after Lenny is out, as
said the new package maintainers), as SHOULD depend on it. The Lenny
version doesn't unfortunately.

My proposal, as it's of course too late for the first release of Lenny,
is that python-iniparse and python-gpgme, plus a patched version of Yum,
would be prepared and send in "lenny proposed updates". The thing is that:

- I don't know what is the way to send it to proposed updates
- I'm not comfortable with python packages, and I don't think it's a
good idea that I take over the maintainership of yum in Debian, even
though I really need this package. Any volunteer out there?

Any suggestion?

Thomas