[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

[Karanbir Singh]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 07:11, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> 
>>>If you managed a set of servers running homegrown code that
>>>may or may not be sensitive to library and utility program
>>
>>You would run a local mirror that only had the updates you tested on
>>it :)
> 
> Local to what?  The production boxes are distributed but have good
> internet connectivity.  The test box only has so-so internet

local to your organisation. If you do have good connectivity, forking 
out for an extra role machine should not be an issue. I fail to see how 
bandwidth has anything to do with yum. no matter what package manager 
you use, you are going to need to pull down the same packages....

Any system admin who needs such solid control on the package tree's will 
host his/her own repository of packages, sometimes even a bunch ( eg. 
based on intended system role ) and run an automated delivery mechanism.

Also, are you saying that you admin a large number of machines, and dont 
actually test the packages before they are rolled out ?

> connectivity.   Isn't having to do that an admission that yum
> doesn't really do a good job of managing the packages you
> want on a box?

there is yumlib, now available. Feel free to hack away.... A lot of the 
'home grown' scripts that I have seen out there are screen-scrapers.... 
which by default, are locked into the specific version/setup of yum 
anyway. Its stupid to think that those sort of scripts are ever going to 
maintain functionality across versions.

btw, you could always go 'basic' and use a bunch of includepkgs and 
excludepkgs directives in your yum.conf :) and have that rsync over to 
all the various machines on a scheduled basis.

> Actually I think some invocation of rpm -q will give a list
> of installed packages that you can feed to yum to install on

you mean something like

rpm -qp *.rpm --qf "%{name}.%{arch} "

which should give you a list of packages... easy to feed that to a yum 
install process...

> another machine, but it is not at all intuitive.  Don't the
> people writing package management tools actually manage any
> machines or understand that keeping them identical is
> desirable?

If a couple of hundred machines counts as 'machines', then yes - the 
people I know -  working on these package management tools do indeed 
manage machines.

perhaps, this conversation needs to move to the yum-devel list, where 
you can then recommend ways to make yum more user-friendly.

- K
-- 
Karanbir Singh   : http://www.karan.org/
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