[CentOS] Updates offered annoyance

[Robert Heller]

At Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:19:25 -0500 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 02:14:02PM +0200, Aleksandar Stoisavljevic wrote:
> > 
> > This is ok when I have good internet speed (@work) but when I am home, this
> > update takes a lot of time.
> 
> 	Welcome to life on the internet.
> 
> > I guess I can skip updates but I wasn't experiencing such annoyance with
> > CentOS 5.4. My gues is that when
> > CentOS 5.4 was finalized there is no updates to that DVD.
> 
> 	Why in the world would you opt to skip updates?  How is updating
> 	your system an annoyance?
> 
> 	5.X are just point-in-time snapshots of CentOS 5 and all patches
> 	leading up to the time that 5.X was released.  Updates are a 
> 	continuing process that will occur for the lifetime of the
> 	release.
> 
> > Is there any suggestions ?
> 
> 	Yes, bite the bullet and update.
> 

The main problem is that yum is NOT well written to deal with a slow
and *unreliable* dial-up interface -- it in fact behaves extremly
poorly when used with dial-up (and no, it is just not possible for me
to get a better internet connection at home -- dialup is *all* that is
available where I live).  It assumes that ANY network problems are due
to a busy server and it switches to another server (and in the case of
metadata, starts the download from the beginning!).  *I* often find it
better to use wget to snarf the repo metadata.  I *also* use my laptop
to *manually* download (using wget) the packages for my desktop machine
(the two machines are different archs: the desktop is x86_64 and the
laptop is a i686).

Oh, and I remove up-to-date and yum's update deamon.  Both are a waste
of time.  (I also removed Open Office, since it is too big to maintain
on a dial-up system, esp. since *I* don't ever do 'word processing'.) I
manually run 'yum check-update' from time to time (when is the centos
updates digest going to resume on this list?).

> 
> 
> 
> 
> 							John
> 

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