Memory usage - default X install can't use yum with 1GB RAM machine

[John Reiser]

> When yum reaches the point of actually installing things, after
> all the memory intensive dependancy computations, the only thing it
> should need to remember is the ordered list of rpm packages to install
> (assuming yum can't just call rpm with the packages in order). It
> should be able to free most of the memory it had to use to calculate
> the ordered list of packages. I am talking in the order of a few kbytes,
> not 300MB.

Python is an interpreted language with garbage collection,
and address-space fragmentation rears its ugly head.  Mere free() won't
do enough.  A compact() is also needed, but is not available in the API.(!)

One way is to build the list of rpm in a file or pipe, and use a shell script
for top-level control.  Using a file has advantages for divide-and-conquer.
Another way to do this is for the top-level to fork(), with the child
doing the work for each major phase.  Then each child is guaranteed
to start out with the same small and compact layout of memory.

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