Back with another overdue update, this time for July. Big news this month, which had been hinted at for a while. Did you figure it out ahead of time?

Hey, it's been a while! I got way behind on pushing out update blogs, so I'll be pushing out updates to catch up on the 2021 and try to be more consistent for 2022.

Today, we're pushing out an update to YUM which will automatically pull in a new ibmi-repos package. The ibmi-repos package will provide two "new" repositories:

• ibmi-base
• ibmi-release

The new ibmi-base repo will point to the same place that the current ibm repo does, while the ibmi-release repo will point at an IBM i version-specific repo.

This will make it easier for us to push out updates to these repos as things change. Currently, the ibm repo is only shipped with the bootstrap and not owned by any package, so we can't push out any updates to it automatically.

Because we would like to make the transition from the ibm repo to the new repos as seamless and error-free as possible, we're pushing out new repo files instead of trying to update the existing repo in-place and we're making yum depend on this new package. This will ensure that all users will get this update when they run updates and any of their local changes to the existing repo will not get overwritten in the process (if the sysadmin has made any changes).

Once migrated to the new repos, the old ibm.repo file can be removed.

More details and a FAQ is available in our docs

Well, I'm a month late, but let's not dawdle any further -- on to the updates!

May updates at the same time as April updates? Madness, I say!