[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

[Greg Knaddison]

On 9/6/05, Dave Gutteridge <dave at tokyocomedy.com> wrote:
> 
> I'd like to comment on this list to say that despite earlier reports
> saying that I had fixed my YUM problems, it still freezes my computer
> every now and again. I've been told this might be because I have too
> little free space on my hard drive, so I cleared over 9 gigs, and it
> still freezes sometimes. 

Dave,

Whomever told you that it might be an overfilled hard drive either has
a bad mental map of how computers work or thought that your problem
was caused by a unlikely corner case.  Run from his advice.

> I was told my RPM database was screwed, so I
> rebuilt the database and it still freezes.
> 

Perhaps, but that typically gives more specific errors that you can
search on and find that an rpm remove/rebuild/repeat will solve your
problem and not just the evil no error that you seem to be
experiencing.

> I'm not sure what the problem is now, but I do know that on the one hand
> YUM seems like a great idea, and when it does work, I think it's really
> cool. But something is not right with it, and I don't even have error
> messages which let me know what went wrong, so I can't say that I would
> recommend YUM.
> 

This is really a pretty harsh criticism without much indication of
what your exact hardware/software specs are and what your problem is. 
Can you please post RAM/CPU, specific version of operating system, and
the result of "yum list updates" if it does complete?

I feel certain that given those bits of information we will be far
down the path of fixing whatever your problem is or at least being
able to point at antiquated/failing hardware as the problem.  And note
my message that yum can work fine with a Pentium133/64MBRAM system, so
"antiquated" really needs to be old for it to not work with yum.

Regards,
Greg