How to deal with disappear-y packages

[leoluk]

Fedora mirrors tend to remove outdated packages relatively quickly. Is there an established workflow for caching those to a mirror?

[rmohr]

We have a generic tool in kubevirt: https://github.com/kubevirt/project-infra/tree/main/robots/cmd/uploader. It uploads all our dependencies to gce.

In general it is multi-layered:

• the upload tool adds the RPMs to gce
• Inside our CI we have a bazel greenhouse cache which stores them as well, to not always go to GCE

[leoluk]

This obscure downloader feature could be an option to avoid the WORKSPACE rewriting: https://blog.aspect.dev/configuring-bazels-downloader

[rmohr]

This obscure downloader feature could be an option to avoid the WORKSPACE rewriting: https://blog.aspect.dev/configuring-bazels-downloader

That is a nice option. In general I like having them in the workspace, since that reflects where they are, and allows easy checking based on the WORKSPACE that dependencies are indeed mirrored.