Linux – Why Building RPMs as Root is Bad

Install yum-utils (edit: and createrepo).

Since a yum repository is just a directory that you run createrepo(8) against and serve over http, functions you mention like uploading, keeping old versions around etc can be done with your usual tools like the shell, ssh, rsync etc. Or are you after a kind of attractive web-based method of managing a repo? I'm not sure if one exists.

As for updating metadata automatically, perhaps just use cron? Really, if these are your own packages then you should have tested the rpm before placing it in the repo, so having something check automatically if a rpm is invalid might not be needed, but again a regular cron job with rpm --test could tell you.

I'm probably missing some great tools but this has worked for me for our limited needs for years.

Go with David's solution of using puppet instead. Really.

However, if you're determined, what you can do is create a package rassie-ntp-conf that contains "/etc/ntp.conf.rassie". In the spec file, you'll need a %post that copies your config over the default config and also a "%triggerin -- ntp-server" that does the same. That way if a later upgrade overwrites the config, the trigger will copy back over it. Maybe drop something into /etc/cron.daily to do the same to be really sure... Probably need to have all those scripts do a service ntpd condrestart after the cp, too.

That's the basics. If you want to do it for more packages, you might instead build a standard script that runs through /etc/rassie/ to find configs to copy over into /etc and have the %post and %triggerin stuff run that instead.

But, really, ignore that and use puppet or Chef or cfengine... This kind of "pushing configuration out via RPM" scheme is fraught with subtle problems stemming from the fundamental problem that RPM isn't designed to have two different packages fight over a single file. Hard to test, hard to debug, exactly the sort of clever solution that will make you later wish you'd gone with puppet in the first place.