yum 3.1.4 and repository medata handling

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

The latest version of yum (3.1.4) in rawhide seems to be behaving rather 
inconsistently when it comes to dealing with repository metadata. I am 
cleaning the cache and metadata and rerunning different commands like 
yum info <package> and yum update to verify.

On some instances it downloads the compressed sqlite database directly. 
  In other instances it downloads and parses the compressed xml file. 
Sometimes it downloads and parses the compressed xml file and then 
proceeds to download the compressed sqlite database too. It seems to be 
occurring randomly. Is there any explanation why. I cant see any reason 
for yum to redundantly download the exact same metadata is the form of 
both xml file and sqlite database.

Downloading the sqlite database has the advantage that the commands are 
much more faster (since it skips the "reading metadata" part) but the 
sqlite database (around 2 MB) also seems to be over the double the size 
of xml files (800 kb). I ran some basic benchmarks with time and Yum 
3.1.4 in rawhide is much faster than yum 3.0.3 in FC6 except for the 
dependency resolving portion.

Rahul