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.

[sourcecode language=”bash”]

#!/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

[/sourcecode]

This is just a sample code. The above code can be customized to do more versatile dummy cloning of Fedora repositories.