[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

[Johnny Hughes]

On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 14:15 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 10:03, Mike McCarty wrote:
> > Johnny Hughes wrote:
> > 
> > > It is a major change ... the entire repo is looked at as a whole at
> > > rebuild time for the metadata, not as 10,000 packages but as one entity.
> > > Because of this fact (as Bryan has pointed out), you would need to keep
> > > older entire repo snapshots of the metadata to use to resolve your
> > > dependencies separately.
> 
> Yet I can look, for example, at:
> http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.1/updates/i386/headers/
> and have no trouble knowing exactly which files were there
> at any given date.  Yum could be at least as smart...
> 

That directory is for up2date (not yum), it would also work for yum
prior to 2.1.x (not what we use in CentOS-4.x) ... this directory is for
yum 2.1 and greater, which is what we use for CentOS-4.x:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.1/updates/i386/repodata/

> > > The more I look at this problem, the more I see that a local repo
> > > maintained by the local user is the right answer.  It works right now,
> > > requires no changes, and let's you control EXACTLY what you want in your
> > > repo (including files from other places in a single repo).
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> > Everyone who has actually done any real configuration management has
> > said this exact thing several times in this thread, and it seems to
> > do absolutely no good.
> 
> The Centos people are doing an excellent job of configuration
> management.  If they say they are planning to start deleting
> and randomly modifying existing files in their repository instead
> of just adding newer ones, I'll give up on it being possible
> to tell what was previously present at the points the .hdr
> files were generated.

I am the CentOS people :)

We currently remove all the update information every time a new point
release is done ... for example, when 4.2 is released, the paths:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/

and

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.2/

will be the same ... there will be no files in the updates tree.  The
4.0 and 4.1 trees will look like this:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4.0/

This is the way we have been doing the trees since Jan 2004.


>   Otherwise, while I agree that yum currently
> uses some repo metadata to quickly ignore .hdr files other
> than the latest, an option to work with timestamps could let
> it construct a view of what was there earlier just as I could
> construct a copy of the whole repository as of a certain time
> simply by observing the timestamps of all .hdr files - something
> that is already viewable.
> 

Johnny Hughes
CentOS-4 Lead Developer
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