yum

[John Summerfield]

Seth Vidal wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 22 Oct 2009, John Summerfield wrote:
> 
>> Seth Vidal wrote:
>>>
>>
>>>> If stdin is not a tty, don't ask, but do it if "--force" so that it 
>>>> can still be scripted.
>>>>
>>>
>>> yum has the protect-packages plugin.
>>>
>>> It does more or less what you mention above.
>>
>> It's not installed on my RHEL-clone system. I don't have a useful 
>> Fedora system at present, so I can't check that.
>>
>> Unless yum-protect-packages is part of the standard set of installed 
>> packages, it's not going to be very effective.
>>
>> I see a lot of yum plugins listed but uninstalled, I don't know what 
>> most of them do. Perhaps more of them should be installed as part of 
>> the  base installation, and users directed to configure them.
> 
> If you install the protect-packages plugin with base it plays hell with 
> things like mock and chroot construction - which is part of the reason 

Then the suggestion isn't really done. I've not used mock (but I might), 
and I have done chroot maintenance, and wouldn't want to do anything to 
make it hard to do so again.

> it is not installed in base. We can work around it - but we've not had 
> much demand for it.

I can understand that, it's taken years for me to get around to 
suggesting it. Still I think it's something that should be done, properly.


> And considering the lack of detail here I don't see that demand 
> increasing overly much.

I tried to be clear, but like whoever wrote these, I may have assumed 
too much:
Name       : yum-kmod
Arch       : noarch
Version    : 1.1.16
Release    : 13.el5.centos
Size       : 17 k
Repo       : base
Summary    : Yum plugin to handle fedora kernel modules.
URL        : http://linux.duke.edu/yum/download/yum-utils/
License    : GPLv2+
Description: Plugin for Yum to handle installation of kmod-foo type of 
kernel modules, when new kernel versions are installed.
Name       : yum-aliases
Arch       : noarch
Version    : 1.1.16
Release    : 13.el5.centos
Size       : 16 k
Repo       : base
Summary    : Yum plugin to enable aliases filters
URL        : http://linux.duke.edu/yum/download/yum-utils/
License    : GPLv2+
Description: This plugin adds the command alias, and parses the aliases 
config. file to enable aliases.


> 
> If you wish to have this protection then you can install it. It's pretty 
> simple.


I'm talking about improving Fedora (and RHEL), not about fixing any 
problems I have. If a package, as installed, lacks a particular feature, 
I'm more likely to assume the feature doesn't exist than to look for 
optional extras. Looking for optional extras for each package - I have 
1227 installed on my desktop system - that lacks some feature I would 
like doesn't scale well.

If the optional extra doesn't work in some (undocumented) circumstances, 
then I agree, it's not generally usable.



I for one would vote for more integrated[1] functionality, and fewer 
optional extras. Some might be turned off by default - not everyone 
should use fastestmirror for example. Yum commands to manipulate plugins 
(and repos) would be handy:
yum list plugins
yum enable plugin fred
yum disable plugin fred
"plugin" and "plugins" should be synonymous, people are likely to use 
either and become frustrated when they guess wrongly.

1 "Integrated" might be satisfied by inclusion in a standard install, I 
don't mean to prescribe how they should be written.

-- 

Cheers
John

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