[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

[John Newbigin]

I look after 3 versions of CentOS, 2, 3 & 4.  Each has it's own 
different version of yum.  Different versions have different command 
line parameters, different header formats, different config file layouts 
etc.

Yum headers are also not very robust.  You can't safely use yum while a) 
updating your mirror or b) running yum-arch (with -c which takes along 
time, esp on openoffice).  This is a PITA when you are patching a lot of 
machines and want to obtain new software at the same time.

I also think that yum needs a way to track certain packages only from a 
specific repository, rather than the entire repo (ie. I want 1 package 
from Dag, not everything).  (I don't know if new versions can do this...)

I also think yum is too slow.

All those issues aside, every other solution seems to have similar 
problems.  On CentOS-2 I normally use arrghpm which is a tool I wrote to 
do what I want.  It does not rely on headers at all but it is not 
designed to solve dependencies (because rpm already does that).

(OT Side note.  Mirroring updates for CentOS 3 & 4 is also a PITA 
because I need to have multiple directories, one for each point release. 
  It is just me???)

Todd Cary wrote:

> I have seen messages posted on the Fedora oriented forums that imply 
> that "yum" is  antiquated.  Not being a Linux guru, I do not have the 
> experience to make a thorough evaluation, but so far it has been just 
> great.
> 
> Todd
> 


-- 
John Newbigin
Computer Systems Officer
Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/staff/jnewbigin