Re: apt, yum, up2date, smartpm, ... ?

On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 11:43:31 -0400, William Stearns wrote:

> Yum does use a local cache (/var/cache/yum/) for headers and packages,
> although you're right that it does check back with the repository server
> each time it's started unless you use the "-C" (operate from cache
> only).

If only... I'm using the version of YUM that comes with FC4:
yum-2.4.0-0.fc4

and -C seems to do little if anything. Certainly a search like:

yum -C search hello

will error out if I'm not connected to the internet (dial-up).

Add to this Yum's apparent cluelessness when it comes to mirrors -- it
seemed to be re-downloading mirrored packages lists if the mirror it
checks hasn't been updated... so every time I ran it, it would choosing a
random mirror, and updating 300K+ of data, not to mention finding a new
packages one run and then swearing they doesn't exists the next (dropping
the mirror lists stopped this).

Yumdownloader has a nice feature "--urls" for dial-up users... but it
insists on generating progress output to stdout when common sense would
suggest that with the --urls option it is being used as part of a chain
and should just shut up and print the urls... it also gets as confused
with mirrors as yum, and in addition generates incorrect urls with dries
repo and had to be hand edited afterwards.

Altogether, yum and utils has been one of the more infuriating set of
packages I've ever used, and seems to have been designed with barely a
thought for anyone not on a nice fast permanent connection.