Feature or bug? (strange?) yum behaviour

[Les Mikesell]

seth vidal wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 18:31 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> There are plenty of ways to get broken code.  I don't think it is a bad 
>> thing to avoid one of them.  And I'm never thrilled when anything adds 
>> interface changes that require knowing the differences between machines 
>> in the scripts that ssh commands to them - as for example when yum 
>> decided not to like --download-only and might or might not do 
>> --downloadonly depending on the circumstances.  (I still have an 
>> assortment of CentoOS3.x boxes running too...).
> 
> okay, your expectations about a program ever changing what its command
> line arguments are (even between major version changes) is unreasonable
> and frankly not pleasant.

It's not an expectation, it's an experience.  I just don't see what the 
point is of a change like that in a needed system utility any more than 
I'd understand if cat changed its name to feline, breaking all the 
scripted work that ever used it.

> The api has remained consistent for rhel and centos in 5. The feature
> set and speed has been enhanced.

So you think it is OK for every version to require different command 
lines for the same common operations?  That is very untypical for 
unix-like systems.


> I'm not going to continue this discussion on this list. If you have a
> problem with what centos ships, take it up on a centos list.

The reason I'm bringing it up here is that this is where the changes 
happen.

> If you have
> a problem with what rhel ships take it up with your sales rep or
> technical account manager.

The problem I mentioned was in FC6, but


> It is offtopic for this list.

Consistency is offtopic?  How odd.  Do I have to look at some other 
distributions to find one that understands that consistent operations 
are valuable?

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com