Centos – Local RPM/YUM repository on Debian

I believe you need a separate repository, with data generated by createrepo, for each distinct release that you are supporting. This is so you have a catalog that yum knows about via your .repo file. Your first proposed method would allow you this.

Using your second method you'd end up having to create repository data for each package you were maintaining, which seems like a nightmare as far as you would have to have repository data for each package.

Additionally, I wouldn't be building inside of your repository (which is the only reason I can think of for separating it out by software). Set up your build environment with rpmdev-setuptree(available in the rpmdevtoolspackage), build the rpms and copy/move them from the build structure to your repository structure (/<root_repo>/<release>/<arch>/<RPMS/SRPMS>), then generate your repository data via createrepo (or createrepo --update . ) in the release ( 5.4 / 4.6 ) directory.

We are mirroring RPMForge form this server:

mirror="rsync://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/dag"

It's quite fast and reliable.For EL5 it takes 13G, I assume it would be the same for 6

It's common practice but it depends how many machines do you have. We are serving our internal mirrort to 3000+ hosts, so it absolutely makes sense