Feature or bug? (strange?) yum behaviour

[James Antill]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 16:30 +0200, Mark wrote:

> Well. let yum first check if the package you try to install is already
> installed (version independent) than let yum (if it finds a installed
> package) ask the user if he/she wants to check for updates of that
> package.
>
> Pseudo code style..
> yum list install gimp [1]
> if yum found gimp
>  - ask to look for updates and install them if the user answers "y"
> else
>  - install gimp

 You can ask for this in a BZ, or on the yum-devel mailing list. It
would be a change in behaviour, and I'm not sure it's a good one ... but
you could ask.
 Of course you can do "yum list gimp" now, before asking it to install
things and the recent versions of yum will give you an answer very
quickly.

> [1] I noticed that yum wants to update his local repository here as
> well. I think it's better to get that behaviour out yum and only
> update it's local repo if there is none available or a update command
> is given or a install command is given.

 No, no, no, NO. I appreciate that apt-get works this way, and so people
are somewhat used to manually managing their metadata ... but it is
absolutely the _wrong_ approach.
 What you might want to do is to up the metadata_expire value[1] and you
almost certainly want to be running yum-updatesd, but with the
downloads/updates turned off (as it will then refresh the metadata when
you aren't waiting on it).


[1] You _can_ set the metadata_expire value to never expire and yum
makecache would then be the apt-get update analogue.
 But I can't stress enough how broken this behaviour is, in the general
case. It's as if your web browser always cached everything forever and
you had to hit shift reload for it to ever speak to the network ... but
worse.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.com>
Fedora