[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

[Greg Knaddison]

On 9/8/05, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 16:24, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> > > >
> > > >   What is it that you don't understand about
> > > >   the "costs" of configuration management?
> > >
> > > The part I don't understand is why the tool built for the
> > > purpose doesn't do what everyone needs it to do.  Is that
> > > simple enough?  Yes, I know I can build my own system.  I
> > > know there are workarounds.  I'd rather not.
> >
> > Yum is not designed for configuration management ... unless you want to
> > update to the latest releases in the repo.  In that case, it works
> > perfectly.
> 
> What I want is to be able to update more than one machine and
> expect them to have the same versions installed.  If that isn't
> a very common requirement I'd be very surprised.

To be very clear - yum is an updating tool and is meant only to keep
your system up to date.  It is not meant in any way to do
configuration management.  People have found ways to make it do
configuration management, and they have explained a variety of methods
that will get it to do configuration management, but no, your request
is absolutely not a common feature request for yum because people
understand that it is meant simply to update systems, not do
"configuration management" on them.


> There are 2 separate issues:
> One is that yum doesn't know if a repository or mirror is consistent
> or in the middle of an update with only part of a set of RPM's
> that really need to be installed together.

Yeah, and I'm pretty sure that this is identified as an unlikely
corner case worth fixing at some point, but I may be wrong.

> 
> The other is that if you update one machine and everything works,
> you have no reason to expect the same results on the next
> machine a few minutes later.

If you want a repository to be consistent, you will need to pay for it
or manage it yourself.  The latter is not difficult, so why is it such
a problem for you aside from a poor network setup for your machines?

> 
> Both issues would be solved if there were some kind of tag mechanism
> that could be applied by the repository updater after all files
> are present and updates could be tied to earlier tags even if
> the repository is continuously updated.
> 
> I realize that yum doesn't do what I want - but lots of people must
> be having the same issues and either going to a lot of trouble to
> deal with them or just taking their chances.
> 

Clearly people are not having this problem.  They have made their own
repositories and gotten on with life.  I don't remember any discussion
of it on the yum list over the last ~1.5 years I've been on the yum
and yum-devel lists.

Greg