why doesn't yum cache anything?

Nils Philippsen nphilipp at redhat.com
Sat Jan 1 12:10:27 UTC 2005


On Fri, 2004-12-31 at 14:06 -0500, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:51:33 -0500, seth vidal <skvidal at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> > are you using mirrorlists or are you using baseurls?
> 
> There is a rather annoying side-effect of mirrorlists -- mirrors may
> not always be in sync, so quite often I issue "yum list updates" and
> see that there are updates, but when I run "yum update" it hits a
> different mirror, where these updates are not yet available. As a
> side-effect, it has to download and parse primary.xml.gz for updates
> each time the mirrors are not in sync, which depending on the
> connection and processor can take a significant amount of time. I get
> around it by forcing -C (cache-only mode) after initially running yum
> to get the repomd.xml, but others may not know about it.

We could use timestamps (either implicit on specific repomd files or
explicit (generated at repo creation, then stored _in_ a file -- if we
don't trust timestamps on mirrors). Yum would remember the timestamp and
would refuse to use mirrors with older timestamps than already seen. Of
course this wouldn't quite solve the problem of primary.xml.gz being
loaded regularly -- in the case where "check-update" used a mirror with
an older timestamp than "update" -- but I'd say that is intentional
then.

We could even have an (undocumented ;-) option ("--use-latest" ?) that
forced yum to check the timestamp against the original repository rather
than what it remembered, just for us people who always need the latest
stuff and can't live with mirror latency ;-).

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
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 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."     -- B. Franklin, 1759
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