Specifying How Yum Downloads Updates

[Bob Gustafson]

On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 00:25 -0500, Jerry Amundson wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 12:07 AM, Bob Gustafson <bobgus at rcn.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 22:28 -0400, Seth Vidal wrote:
> >>
> >> On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, Bob Gustafson wrote:
> >>
> >> > On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 13:46 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >> >> On Mon, 2009-04-13 at 21:24 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >>>> the download by pkg size behavior was changed precisely b/c of how many
> >> >>>> raving complaints we got about it.
> >> >>>>
> >> >>>> Seems like we can't win.
> >> >>>>
> >> >>>>
> >> >>>> And the first person to say "well then make it an option" gets told to
> >> >>>> stop talking until they're maintaining the code.
> >> >>> ----
> >> >>> those are the people who infuriate you by eating the icing from the
> >> >>> middle of the Oreo's first.
> >> >>>
> >> >>> I'm clearly just eat the cookie kind of person.
> >> >>
> >> >> I like the download-by-package-size behaviour, but I ALSO eat the icing
> >> >> first.
> >> >>
> >> >> I reject your orthodoxy, tyrant!
> >> >> --
> >> >
> >> > When it comes to yum, there is only one tyrant..
> >>
> >> eyeroll.
> >>
> >> yes. I'm a horrible tyrant b/c I generally think that the only line of
> >> code that is bug free is the line of code that WAS NEVER WRITTEN.
> >>
> >> I also think that LESS CODE == BETTER.
> >>
> >> I do not think features are always better and I frequently think that
> >> having a knob for everything doesn't help anyone, least of all the
> >> maintainers of the code.
> >>
> >>
> >> -sv
> >>
> >
> > Ahh, but with yum, you must be very careful when deleting/removing a
> > component, because of all the dependencies that get ripped out too.
> 
> No, yum has no such "carefulness" requirement. RPM has dependencies,
> and yum very nicely prompts to override them. If you choose to do so,
> your fault.
> 
> > This is because you did not include a usage count for each component.
> 
> Is that the Royal "you"? The "usage count", by anybodies definition,
> is ambiguous,  and I pray that no one codes such a "feature" into open
> sources distros.
> 
> > Some folks would consider that a serious omission, (debian folks),
> > rather than LESS == BETTER.
> 
> One of the many reasons I'm no longer one of the "debian folk".
> 
> jerry
> 

The yum/rpm package management is cruder than Debian's aptitude/dpkg

See http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkgtools.en.html  Section 7.5

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Similar situations occur when dealing with libraries: generally these get
installed since packages containing applications depend on them. When the
application-package is purged, the library-package might stay on the system. Or:
when the application-package no longer depends upon e.g. libdb4.2, but upon
libdb4.3, the libdb4.2 package might stay when the application-package is upgraded.

In these cases, `foo-data' doesn't depend on `foo', so when you remove the `foo'
package it will not get automatically removed by most package management tools.
The same holds true for the library packages. This is necessary to avoid
circular dependencies. If you use aptitude (see aptitude, Section 7.1.3) as your
package management tool it will, however, track automatically installed packages
and remove them when no packages remain that need them in your system.

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