Thank you, unknown genius!

[Anton Solovyev]

Craig White wrote:

>> Remember the row we had about a year ago on the missing "Install
>> Everything" option? Myself, I'd much rather get as much installed during
>> the initial install, then to have to yum what I want, post install. Ric
> ----
> I was referring to exactly that with my hat tip to Claude...
> 
> I'm at the stage now where I have my own mirrors at work and I just
> kickstart install the same suite on all computers and adjust from there
> if necessary. Too much just weighs down each and every update.
> 
> I do appreciate that with dial-up, the experience does change.

(Just like all tools of similar nature) yum has a good potential of killing your 
system when something unexpected happens. I have had yum kill a box at least 
once after something like terminal session timeout or a ctrl-c. Something to the 
effect of leaving two versions of each package with the subsequent destruction 
of the system on the attempt to remove the duplicates. I am sure it was my 
fault, of course.

(I am a little vague there, but I think older Redhats had some other tool for 
getting updates and that one was a bit more robust)

Either way, I prefer to just never run yum/blahm/whatever after a get a usable 
system, if I can help it.

Fedora makes this decision (not to run automatic update tools) pretty easy: the 
updates are available for a lot shorter time than the lifetime of my system, so 
by the time I may want to update something it's not there anyway.

Also, in my experience the only way to get a usable system has always been to 
install everything. Otherwise I'd be scrambling to get installed something 
obvious like lynx or tcpdump or pop3 or gcc or libraries or kernel headers all 
the time. This would always happen at the most inconvenient time when my mind 
would be miles away from remembering yum or rpm syntax and pitfalls.

-- 

Anton Solovyev