Thoughts and Questions On Yum, Up2Date. Etc.

[Phil Schaffner]

On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 15:16, William Hooper wrote:
> billg said:
> > 1)  Is yum's unresponsiveness due to mirror load? If so, why wasn't
> > up2date slow?  Just dumb luck?  Do they not look at the same
> > repositories?
> 
> Up2date has code to pick a random mirror.  Yum does not.

Well, yum takes a bit more work.  The onus is on the user to select the
list of mirrors to randomize, but from "man yum.conf":

failovermethod
     can be either 'roundrobin' or 'priority'.   roundrobin  randomly
     selects a url out of the list of urls to start with and proceeds
     through each of them as it encounters a failure  contacting  the
     host.
     priority  starts from the first baseurl listed and reads through
     them sequentially.
     failovermethod defaults to roundrobin if not specified.

Example:

[os]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base OS
baseurl=ftp://linux.stanford.edu/pub/mirrors/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os
  http://ftp.dulug.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os
  http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/$releasever/$basearch/os
  http://fedora.redhat.com/releases/fedora-core-$releasever
failovermethod=roundrobin
gpgcheck=1


> 
> > 2)  Why offer more than one way update a Fedora system?
> 
> Why not?  yum has features up2date doesn't and up2date has features yum
> doesn't.

Then there's apt-get - with different +/-

Phil