FC5 - T3 - Had enough. Package Managers, Yumex is crap.

[Tim]

On Sun, 2006-03-05 at 23:17 -0800, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> Unfortunately, yumex and package manager is really a bad
> design IMHO because when I went through all the trouble
> of identifying the packages I wanted installed (it was
> massive), all of these packages would spend 12 hours
> downloading GB of files from the Internet, start testing
> the transaction and either crash or hang the FC5-T3 completely,
> i.e I could no longer ping FC5-T3.

In the past I'd found that whatever method was involved, trying to
install/update a huge number of packages would stress things out too
much.  There must be a lot of computations to determine all the
dependencies, something that is a major bugbear in Linux that I've not
had to deal with in other OSs - too many interdependencies.  So I'd
install a small group of things at a time.  e.g. Install openoffice by
itself, and let the manager get the extra files it needed.  Then do
something similar with internet packages, etc.

> Restarting the package programs, would perform a yum clean up
> effectively wiping out the 12 hours (3 times) or so downloaded
> package I was looking for the designer of these package program
> and wanted to say a few unkind words. 

I hadn't encountered that, and I thought the clean-out option was a
non-default *option*.  I have previously encounted servers that won't
resume, so an interrupted large package had to be redownloaded, but
generally the update/install process could pick up from where it left
off.

> Maybe the best thing to do is to download the RPM files and
> do a rpm manual install and toss these package managers
> completely out of my FC5-T3 system.

I've done something similar with second Linux boxes.  First installed
normally on one box.  Installed minimally on another.  Looked at what
packages the first box installed, and network them over to manually
install sans-hand-holding-package-manager.

> Hell, with yumex, I tried to select 5 packages - it went through
> the whole thing up to transaction testing and the whole program
> dropped dead, i.e. the entire application program disappeared
> and no trace/log of what the heck happened.  Yumex is in serious
> need of repair - it is extremely unstable.

I find it tediously slow to use.  I generally only use it for when I
need to find a program, but don't know which one.  It's searchable
listing of programs with short descriptions is convenient.  But it's "go
back to start", and slowly start again for the next thing, after
installing a package is a complete pain.

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