[CentOS] Re: Why is yum not liked by some? -- CVS analogy (and why you're not getting it)

Fri Sep 9 13:25:34 UTC 2005
Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 08:54 -0400, William Hooper wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 17:37, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> [snip]
> >> 1.  The repository to have every single package -- be it
> >> packages as whole, or some binary delta'ing between RPMs (if possible)
> >
> > It just needs to  keep every package that it has ever had - at
> > least as long as it might be useful for someone to install them. That seems
> > to be the case now.

> I don't know of any repo that keeps all packages ever released.  CentOS
> moves them out of the repo so everyone doesn't have to mirror them. 
> Fedora Core completely removes old packages (I have the rsync deletes to
> prove it).  I only see the newest versions in Dags repo.
> 

What we keep in the repo is just the latest point release (ie
CentOS-4.1 ... which corresponds to el4 update1, CentOS-3.5, etc.) and
updates to that.  If you wanted anything older than that, you would need
to get it from http://vault.centos.org/ and not our normal repos.

Even RH doesn't maintain every RPM for the release available via RHN ...
just the most current. 

> And again, I ask, who decides if it is "useful for someone to install
> them"?  If the CentOS maintainers didn't feel the new packages were ready,
> they wouldn't release them.
> 

correct .. we have a seperate beta.centos.org for beta releases and a
testing repo for released versions.

If we release it, we think it is production ready.

> > Sorry, I just don't buy the concept that rsync'ing a whole
> > repository is an efficient way to keep track of the timestamps on a few
> > updates so you can repeat them later.  Rsync imposes precisely that big
> > load on the server side that you wanted to avoid having everyone do.
> 
> Rsync only imposes that load the once or twice a month you sync, not every
> time a machine does a "yum update".

The rsync load would be on our servers ... not yours ... you are running
the client to download files ... we are running the servers :)

It would be much more load, cost, bandwidth to leave all the files in
all the repos for all the arches and mirror that to 100,000 other places
at more than 100GB extra per server.

> 
> As I've said before, if you have your test machines pointed at the
> official mirrors, you have the RPMs you need and can just copy them into
> your repo and run createrepo, no rsync needed.
> 

That is true too ... it is just not a tree that could do full network
installs, etc.  And for just a little more space than the RPMS, you can
do that too.
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