The Great Package Management Experiment

The Great Package Management Experiment

Posted Sep 25, 2003 14:36 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094)
Parent article: The Great Package Management Experiment

Hi,
I wanted to reply to a couple of the comments here:

<quote>
* One of the main disadvantages of the yum package manager is that it only works with a Red Hat mirror, which has been "yumified". A yumified mirror contains a separate directory with header files of every available RPM package. At present, not many mirrors appear to have been yumified.
</quote>

A number of repositories are available, all of fedora, all of freshrpms, all of their mirrors, a number of the red hat mirrors and a number of repositories listed at: http://linux.duke.edu/yum/repos/

<quote>
* The upgrade process aborted with errors on countless occasions. Even a simple error such as a failure to download a package for whatever reason brought the upgrade to a halt and had to be manually restarted. Once restarted, yum went through a lengthy dependency checking period, despite the fact that no change had been made to the package selection. Also, yum does not seem to have the ability to re-try fetching a package in case the first attempt fails.
</quote>

It retries up to 3 times or up to the number of times you set in the configuration file - man yum.conf would have gotten you this information.
If you'd like it to retry forever simply set retries=0 in the [main] section in the config file.

<quote>
* A major upgrade such as this one can take many hours, but unlike Debian or Mandrake's package managers, yum gives no indication about the progress or estimated time left.
</quote>

I'm not sure what version of yum you were using but the ones I'm using output a progress number of number of operations left to perform during the upgrade. If you're complaining out the lack of a download progress bar, then that is correct, there isn't a progress bar on downloads, but please try to be specific in your critiques.

-sv

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