[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

Tue Sep 6 12:39:11 UTC 2005
Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com>

On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Johnny Hughes wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-09-06 at 10:58 +1000, John Newbigin wrote:
>
> > 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.
> 
> It is the safest thing to do to create your own yum headers with yum-
> arch ... but we do not so that for the 14 mirrors that get mirrored from
> the master mirror.  For at least CentOS-3 and 4, these work fine without
> running yum-arch (or createrepo) on any mirror except the master mirror
> and rsync'ing it to the rest.

Jeff Pitman added something to rsync I requested and it was accepted in 
rsync 0.6.3. It allows to do near-atomic updates when mirroring. What it 
does is during rsyncing all updates are made to a ghost-directory and at 
the end of the updates all changes are applied together.

This narrows the window of opportunity where people might be using 
yum/apt/smart when the metadata had been replaced but not all the files 
were in place or vice versa.

Before this change I had to be careful to sync my main mirror in between 
intervals when the public mirror was scheduled to sync (to avoid the same 
kind of conflict). With this functionality I have much more flexibility as 
the metadata and data are being updated almost atomically (instead of 
sometimes 2 to 3 hours delay between my first file and my last file due to 
slow upstream bandwidth).

The functionallity is called --delay-updates and both server and client 
need support for this to make it work.

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]