yum.conf clean-up

[Satish Balay]

On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Matt Morgan wrote:

> When I first installed fedora core, I was entirely clueless about yum, 
> although I knew about apt from the debian experience I have. Anyway I 
> didn't see that great page that says, basically, rpm.livna.org will 
> provide most of the things that aren't provided by fedora.us, and that 
> the combination of the two will mostly do everything.
> 
> So before I figured that out, I needed to install k3b, wine, libmad, and 
> as a result I have a bunch of other repositories listed in my yum.conf. 
> Freshrpms (libmad and other k3b dependencies), xcyb.org (k3b), 
> sunsite.dk (wine), for example. I was about to add Dag Wieers' 
> repository to get Java, when I decided I needed to clean up yum.conf.
> 
> What happens if I remove them now, and no other repository updates one 
> of the packages I have installed? Do I get some warning that I have 
> "orphaned" packages? Or do I just have to figure out myself which 
> packages are no longer being updated? (Or try to figure out ahead of 
> time, which source provides which packages).

Will work fine untill some packages get updated that changes/breaks
existing dependencies. At that time - yum will give nice errors -
indicating what depency is broken. Yum don't care if this bad
dependency is from orphaned package or not.

And for your sanity - to know what packages are orphaned - you can do:

yum list extras

> The reason I ask is, yum will go faster if I have only the minimum 
> number of repositories set up. So I want that file to be as short as 
> possible. Also, obviously, I don't want to use bandwidth at any more 
> repositories than is necessary.

You can maintain multiple yum.conf files 

/etc/yum.conf - basic repositories
/etc/yum.conf.full - full listing of repos.

yum update [frequent usage]
yum -c /etc/yum.conf.full update [infrequent usage]

And when not doing updates - use local/cache only mode

yum -C remove package

Satish