[fedora-india] Usability Pondering- Yum

Ashok Gautham scriptdevil.fedora at gmail.com
Sat Jun 13 13:56:44 UTC 2009


When I use yum and install software, N is the default choice.
I feel that from usability perspective, yes should be the default
value. I wanted to know if there was any motive behind this
strange choice. Or was it that the developers of yum felt people
would use install instead of info or deplist?

(However, I do feel that no must the be default as it is for
removal of packages)

Also, I feel that for a system, one version of a package that has
been downloaded should be kept on the hard disk and could
be overwritten by the next release of the package. If a user
installs a package and then uninstalls it and finally reinstalls it,
he should not be redownloading the package. I find that only
the downloaded and yet-to-be-installed packages are present
in /var/cache/yum/*. The manpage of yum tells me that they are
not automatically removed. But I found them to be automatically
deleted after they have been installed(Fedora11)

On further probing, I found keepcache to be set to 0 in
/etc/yum.conf. This contradicts with the manpage.


---
Ashok `ScriptDevil` Gautham




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