[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

Thu Sep 8 16:53:45 UTC 2005
William Hooper <whooperhsd3 at earthlink.net>

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 11:09, William Hooper wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>>
>>> I think that might be a reasonable starting point. But it doesn't
>>> solve the problem of attempting updates as a repository is being
>>> modified. You have to work around that even if you do your own
>>> snapshot copies.
>>
>> If you run the repo, you can control it so machines aren't trying to
>> update during the (very short time) that you are running createrepo.
>>
>> If you don't run your own repo, then all bets are off.  Of course, if
>> you don't run your own repo, how are you going to be sure the older
>> version of any give package is there when you want to install it?
>
> Does anyone delete released packages from repositories?

I know there have been more than two errata versions of httpd for RHEL 3,
but I only see two in the CentOS updates repo.

>  Regardless,
> they have to come from somewhere.  How do you know that the 'somewhere'
> that you use isn't inconsistent at the time you take your copy of the
> contents?  Is there a test to make sure that all possible dependencies can
> be resolved within a repository

Yum-utils has repoclosure.

> - and is that enough to know that the
> snapshot you took is actually what the OS developers intended to be used
> together?

I would assume that any issues of that nature would come out in QA.

>  I'm looking for something like a tag that can be applied to a
> CVS repository that would be applied by
> someone who knows the state is consistent and can be used by anyone else to
> retrieve exactly that state regardless of ongoing changes.

Again, if you run the repository, you get to decide on the changes.  One
approach would be to create multiple repos at different stages (using
hardlinks as needed to reduce disk space).  OTOH, I personally can't see a
need for more than "testing" and "stable" repos.  If a machine falls out
of these two categories for any reason, it probably needs to be handled
more hands on anyway, and would get the needed exclusions in the config
files.

-- 
William Hooper