prevent yum deleting downloaded updates

[David Boles]

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Nigel Henry wrote:
| On Sunday 06 January 2008 15:47, David Boles wrote:
|
| <snip>
|
| Hi David. On FC2 I was installing all the latest low latency realtime kernels
| from planetccrma. The advice from Fernando at planetccrma was to disable the
| installonlyn plugin, which you now have to do in /etc/yum.conf, by adding the
| line.
| installonly_limit=0
|
| As I've already said, I use Apt, but all the same went through this procedure
| with Yum, just in case I had an Apt problem, and had to use Yum, and didn't
| want to lose kernels.
|
| Some of the kernels from planetccrma were quite experimental, and some
| wouldn't even boot on my machine. The kernels were coming fast and furious
| from planetccrma, and if I hadn't disabled the installonlyn plugin, I would
| have lost my Fedora kernels if I'd been using Yum. Also on the FC2 machine
| that I'm e-mailing from, the planetccrma realtime kernels have a problem with
| NTP, and I use this machine for getting my time from the Internet. If I had
| been using Yum with it's 2 kernel limit, I'd have found myself with 2
| planetccrma lowlatency realtime kernels that were having problems with NTP,
| and resulted in the clock simply stopping after a short time, until the mouse
| was moved. Don't ask me why, as I have no idea.
|
| As it is on this FC2 machine, I have 4 kernels available, as below.
| 2.6.5-1.358   (the original from the install disks)
| 2.6.10-2.3.legacy_FC2  (the latest from fedora legacy before it shutdown)
| 2.6.10-0.4.rdt.rhfc2.ccrma
| 2.6.10-2.1.ll.rhfc2.ccrma
|
| I don't use the planetccrma ones, because as I've said they cause problems
| with NTP, but it's nice to have them, if I want to try some music app with a
| lowlatency realtime kernel.
|
| Forgive me. This is not a rant on the importance of keeping all kernels, but
| just the way I like to work. It's nice to have the choice of removing an
| unwanted kernel, rather than Yum deciding for me. (not my problem as I use
| Apt)
|
| Just one other example for the sake of it. Not Fedora, but my Debian installs.
|
| Now Debian uses Apt, as you know, but if it used Yum with the default
| settings, I'd have lost a lot of kernels that personally I want to have
| access to.
|
| My Debian installs have been continuously upgraded from my 3.0.r2 (Woody)
| cdroms.
|
| Looking at Etch, I have the following kernels installed.
| 2.4.27...
| 2.6.8...
| 2.6.17
| 2.6.18-3
| 2.6.18-4
| 2.6.18-5  (this one is still being updated with later revisions)
|
| With Yum as default, I'd have lost all but 2 of these.
|
| Most recently on Etch, I've installed some realtime kernels from the Musix
| repo, to see if I can get realtime working on Etch, and yes, realtime does
| work, but am getting everything locking up from time to time, so it's nice to
| be able to boot a kernel that I know works with no problems. Realtime kernels
| as below.
| 2.6.21-rt4
| 2.6.21.5-rt18
| 2.6.23.1-rt4
|
| Again, if I'd being using Yum (though not available on Debian) I'd have found
| myself with just 2 of the realtime kernels, and would have lost all the
| others.
|
| Maybe this is just Fedora trying to make it easy for Ex windows users, who are
| usually ignorant as to what is going on when updating, and don't want to know
| anyway. A just "let the updates get on with it attitude".
|
| Getting back to my original reply to the OP's question, which was to do with
| preventing Yum from trashing the cache.
|
| I'm on dialup, and often install another instance of a Fedora version. Again,
| as I use Apt, I save all the updates from /var/cache/apt/archives from
| whichever Fedora version to a Fat32 partition on another harddrive. That way
| I can install another instance of whichever Fedora version, copy the archives
| back into /var/cache/apt, which will overwrite an empty archives directory,
| and don't have to suffer downloading all the updates again. An apt-get update
| will retrieve the package lists, and an apt-get dist-upgrade will use the
| already downloaded packages that are available in /var/cache/apt/archives on
| the new Fedora instance that I want to update.
|
| Trashing the cache may be ok for broadband users, but if you're on dialup,
| it's not so funny having to download the same stuff again, and that's apart
| from the abuse of Internet bandwidth. We'll leave the spammers out of the
| equation. I'd love to stop them, but there's not much chance of that. Saving
| the cache/downloaded updates can save bandwidth if you are going to install
| another instance of the same Fedora version. Also if you remove an app for
| whatever reason, and want to re-install it, it's already downloaded, and can
| just re-install it with a "yum install <package name>".
|
| Sorry, but that last bit sounded like a rant, but that's just the way I feel
| as a dialup user, and also sickened by the type of spam that turns up in
| Kmails wastebin courtesy of bogofilter. These spammers must be seriously
| sick. as 80% of it centres on the mail sex organ.
|
| I usually flick through the wastebin to see that there are no ham mails
| wrongly identified, but am even getting sick of doing that, and bogofilter
| hasn't made any errors yet.
|
| End of rant.


As I said earlier Nigel I was just curious. It used to be that nothing was
deleted and many complained about having several versions of the same
package(s) in the caches. And too many kernels installed. Those threads went
on as long as some do today.  ;-)

And I remember dialup too. I used to buy my disks for that very reason.

The jigdos from FedoraUnity could be a good thing for you on an
untouched/updated machine. The major problem would be that many very large
packages have been updated.

Have a good day.
- --


~  David
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