Yum: the dreaded metadata disease

[Claude Jones]

On Tuesday December 18 2007 11:45:52 am Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I agree that the yum system is very good.
>
> But if as you say the problem is a temporary one caused by
> updating (and it is my experience that the problem usually,
> but not always, cures itself in time)
> surely it should not be beyond the wit of man
> to have some method of disabling repositories while they are
> updating?
>

Michael S's comments were better informed than mine. However, 
what you suggest is probably feasible, but, it means someone 
figuring out the code and writing it, testing it, bug-zapping 
it, re-testing, and then getting a hundred or more mirror admins 
from all over the world to install it on their servers, many of 
which aren't even running Fedora, much less Redhat -- so, maybe 
not beyond the wit, but, perhaps beyond the resources...

> Also my main gripe is that these yum errors are becoming much
> more common, in my experience.
>

I don't know - I haven't gotten that impression at all, but, I 
can understand it being frustrating when it does happen, 
especially if you need some update NOW - but, in those 
situations, you always have the recourse of manually downloading 
a needed package.

> In this case I decided to solve the problem by updating this
> laptop to Fedora-8, which probably due to good luck
> seems to have taken far less time than resolving the metadata
> problem probably would have done.
> I'm currently updating 315 Fedora-8 packages, which seems to
> be going fine.

Well, that's an interesting solution! 

You must have a lean machine if you only updated 315 packages - 
both my yum upgrades recently, involved over 1300 packages. 

-- 
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA