[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 10:03, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Johnny Hughes wrote:
> 
> > It is a major change ... the entire repo is looked at as a whole at
> > rebuild time for the metadata, not as 10,000 packages but as one entity.
> > Because of this fact (as Bryan has pointed out), you would need to keep
> > older entire repo snapshots of the metadata to use to resolve your
> > dependencies separately.

Yet I can look, for example, at:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.1/updates/i386/headers/
and have no trouble knowing exactly which files were there
at any given date.  Yum could be at least as smart...

> > The more I look at this problem, the more I see that a local repo
> > maintained by the local user is the right answer.  It works right now,
> > requires no changes, and let's you control EXACTLY what you want in your
> > repo (including files from other places in a single repo).
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Everyone who has actually done any real configuration management has
> said this exact thing several times in this thread, and it seems to
> do absolutely no good.

The Centos people are doing an excellent job of configuration
management.  If they say they are planning to start deleting
and randomly modifying existing files in their repository instead
of just adding newer ones, I'll give up on it being possible
to tell what was previously present at the points the .hdr
files were generated.  Otherwise, while I agree that yum currently
uses some repo metadata to quickly ignore .hdr files other
than the latest, an option to work with timestamps could let
it construct a view of what was there earlier just as I could
construct a copy of the whole repository as of a certain time
simply by observing the timestamps of all .hdr files - something
that is already viewable.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com