Call for Yum Frontend

[Robin Laing]

Davy Brion wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-05-09 at 01:21, Austin Isler wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> who cares about what 'they' say?  should we not try to offer the best
> possible linux solution to various types of linux users just because of
> what 'they' say?
> 
> If a yum frontend would be included, would that in any way prevent you
> from using CLI yum? I don't think so.  At most, it would take you longer
> to get to know about CLI yum because the GUI yum would be more visible
> to you from the start... but then again, since you said you would like
> to use a terminal as much as possible, you'd find out about the CLI yum
> very soon anyway.
> 

My feelings are mixed on this.

I like up2date for some things and Yum for others just as I like CLI 
for somethings and GUI for others.  I usually work in both on a daily 
basis.

I feel that improving up2date to use the yum.conf file as well as add 
the ability to list and find applications would be great.  A single 
config file would be the first move.

Remember that being a Linux advocate also means how to get "Windows 
users to like Linux".  I have worked with people that had to use Linux 
for work and hated the idea of using a CLI and in many cases didn't 
know about cd to change directories.  I remember an rpm manager that 
was in earlier versions of RH that seemed to be okay but I hardly ever 
used it.

To appease the Windows users will require a GUI frontend that 
intigrates yum and up2date and possibly apt.  I don't know enough 
about how the repositories work but it may require some redesign on 
the sites to get the best of all worlds.

I have modified my up2date to look at my yum sites for updates.

There is also the issue of duplicated spools for headers and rpm's. 
It would be nice if they could use the same directories.  I don't know 
if the *.hdr files are the  same.  If they are at least a symlink 
would eliminate duplicates.

/var/spool/up2date
/var/cache/yum


-- 
Robin Laing