Feature or bug? (strange?) yum behaviour

[Les Mikesell]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 6:30 AM, Mark <markg85 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:markg85 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     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
> 
>     [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.
> 
>     Hope that explains it better.
> 
> 
> 
> Human: I want to see what version of a package I have installed without 
> doing network access.
> 
> Yum command:  yum list installed packagename
> 
> Human I want to see if there is an update of that package available
> 
> Yum command  yum list updates packagename
> 
> I dont see a reason why yum needs to be interactive and prompt for a 
> chain of queries..when you can do the queries yourself in whatever order 
> you desire.

The main reason would be that for most of the commands, yum decides for 
itself each time whether or not it will spend several minutes chatting 
with repositories and mucking around the rpm database before getting 
back to the human that may have not typed the right question the first 
time.  Meanwhile the human will get bored and read email lists to fill 
his time.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com