What's up with yum lately

[Paul Howarth]

Douglas Phillipson wrote:
> For the past couple of months, yum seems a bit flaky.  Running FC4 some 
> of the repositories are unavailable and yum just fails and dies.  Are 
> there any parameters I can set in my xxxx.repo files or yum.conf that 
> will allow yum to continue if a repository is down?  If a particular 
> repository is down, I still want to update anything from repositories 
> that are up.
> 
> I'm also getting the following error:
> 
> Setting up Update Process
> Setting up repositories
> Reading repository metadata in from local files
> primary.xml.gz            100% |=========================| 861 kB    00:03
> http://ftp.belnet.be/packages/dries.ulyssis.org/fedora/linux/4/i386/dries/RPMS/repodata/primary.xml.gz: 
> [Errno -1] Metadata file does not match checksum
> Trying other mirror.
> Error: failure: repodata/primary.xml.gz from dries: [Errno 256] No more 
> mirrors to try.
> 
> Does this indicate someone is trying to spoof a repository?

No, it's usually a mirror synchronization problem. Some bits of the 
source repo changed whilst the mirror was copying it. This should be a 
transient problem.

The chances of yum being changed to continue in the event of a repo 
being down are very slim. It's been asked for before and rejected, 
because you might get updates installed from repo A instead of the 
"down" repo B because A has a later version of a package you've 
installed from B, and you can't "see" the even later version of the 
package in repo B. Since A and B could be implemented in very different 
ways (for example, the various clamav packages from different repos), it 
would not be a good idea to install the package from A, which would 
never get installed if B was available.

Paul.