Respinning Fedora Core 6

My favorite distro updates its packages frequently. If I wanted to install a new FC6 system, I would have to do updates all over again. So I decided to try the respins, which are distributions that contain the latest updates from the official repositories.

However, Fedora Unity, which packages the respins, currently only offer torrents. It's not that I don't like torrents, it's just that I can't use them. There was mention of Jigdo for the respins, but I can't find the .jigdo nor .template files. Update: Jigdo files are available now.

I was left with no option but do my own respin. Enter pungi:

The pungi project is two things. First and foremost it is a free opensource tool to spin Fedora installation trees / isos. It will be used to produce Fedora releases from Fedora 7 on until it is replaced by something better. Secondly pungi is a set of python libraries to build various compose like tools on top of. Pungi provides a library with various funtions to find, depsolve, and gather packages into a given location. It provides a second library with various functions to run various Anaconda tools on the gathered packages and create isos from the results.

So here's what I did:

1. Install pungi. Since it's in Fedora Extras, it was a simple yum install pungi.


2. Create my own configuration file:
   

   # Pungi config file
   [default]
   product_name = Fedora Core
   product_path = Fedora
   iso_basename = FC
   comps = /home/d3m/pungi/comps-fc6.xml
   yumconf = /etc/yum.conf
   destdir = /home/d3m/pungi/i386
   cachedir = /home/d3m/pungi/cache
   arch = i386
   version = 6
   discs = 5
   getsource = No
   

   
   
   Note that I used my Fedora box's yum.conf to get packages from the repos I set there.


3. Create a working directory for the pungi files, and in it, two subdirectories for the destination and cache:
   

   $ mkdir -p ~/pungi/i386; mkdir -p ~/pungi/cache



4. In the working directory, I placed the comps.xml and config file.


5. Run pungi as root:
   

   $ sudo pungi -c pungi.fc6.i386



6. If all goes well, there would be ISOs under ~/pungi/i386/6/isos.

I hit a few snags. Sometimes, because of connectivity issues, pungi failed to download some RPMs. When I reran pungi, it would fail because there are already existing RPMs in the cache and destination directories. That meant I had to start all over again: delete all previously downloaded packages and run pungi again. Pungi also failed when there were no associated source RPMs for certain packages -- weird, that one. I had to turn off downloading of the sources in the config file (getsource = No).

Through all that, I was finally able to get DVD as well as CD ISOs.