This is a good concept - I am using something similar since about 10
years. I started off doing it with rsync. But the rsync mirrors kept
growing scarce - and the sites made noises like: plain users undesired,
rsync is mainly for mirror downloads. Recently there appears to be
movement back to rsync (servers now having more memory?)
I am now using ftp (an lftp client) and urpmi --noclean, moving package
files (scripts) to my local repository directories after the initial
download, and having the leaves of theses directories configured as
file://... resources for ulteriour installs.
In case you stick to rsync, you might be interested in rpmsync - was
available on Mandriva, I think presently not on Mageia: rpmsync knows
about versions of packages and could, if my memory is right, destroy
obsoleted versions - for rsync they are just files and stay; but you can
easily make a script that purges obsoleted package files with obsoleted
versions).
If you intend to use a local mirror for downloaded packages beyond an
initial just "look and see" period, put some thought into how you
organise your local repository. Mine (for Mageia 1) looks like
/repository/Mageia/1/core/updates (/repository is on a shared non-OS
filesystem)
and so forth - for instance I can presently use
".../cauldron/core/release" in place of ".../1/core/release" (when the
downloaded packages are moved from /var/cache/urpmi/rpms, I sort them
into a directory tree that looks like a Mageia repository tree - not
strictly necessary, but keeps things structured and tidy. I used this
scheme when I was distro-hopping checking what could replace Mandriva
(for instance, worked nicely with Fedora), the move from Mandriva to
Mageia only required minor changes of the scripts.
To avoid misunderstandings: I do not keep a full local mirror, I just
mirror the packages I really use (in the past, at the end of the 6-month
life of a Mandriva release, the repository branch for a version took
between 500 and 1000 MBytes - my Cauldron repository presently has 1,2
Gigabytes - but I did not do a purge for a long time).
Good luck! Juergen
