[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

[Dag Wieers]

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, David Johnston wrote:

> On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 11:01 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > On Thursday 08 September 2005 15:12, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 13:07, Johnny Hughes wrote:
> > > > So, seriously, the best thing would be for you to create a directory
> > > > that contains all your RPMS ... you put only the ones that you have
> > > > approved in there.  
> > > OK, but I basically want to include all official updates here but
> > > I just want to delay/control rolling them out to make sure there
> > > are no surprises.
> > 
> > One of the key reasons that CVS works so well for source is that, once the 
> > initial import is done, everything is done via diffs and patches.  This makes 
> > the repository smaller, and automatically makes the things CVS does well 
> > (multiple versions, consistent repository states) done.  While a CVS commit 
> > is in progress, for instance, other users still see the previous state; this 
> > is not true for a YUM repository.
> 
> Hmm.  This sounds like the crux of the problem.  If the mirroring
> software could be tricked into copying the repodata last, wouldn't this
> problem (and this thread) go away?

rsync does not allow you to specify an order, however rsync has 2 options.
--delay-updates will update the mirror at the end of the sync, which is 
near atomic (this is functionality that Jeff Pitman wrote when I needed it 
for my repository) and you have an atomic-script that comes with rsync 
that hardlinks the tree, makes updates in that new tree and finally 
atomically puts it all back.

Mirrors (that copy data as well as metadata) should start using 
the --delay-updates option. It requires more diskspace during the sync 
though.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]