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

Fri Sep 9 14:55:04 UTC 2005
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Fri, 2005-09-09 at 07:54, William Hooper wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 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.

For the scope of what I'm asking, the "useful" period is the
amount of time you need to run a test machine and would want to
duplicate that tested update.  Maybe a few weeks at most... 
I agree that updates are always desirable and that CentOS updates
almost never break things so there is no reason to be far behind.


> > 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".

Caching network content without having to make a special effort for
every different source is a problem that was solved eons ago by
squid and similar caching proxies.  My other complaint about yum
is that it goes out of its way to prevent this from being useful
in the standard way.  No machine behind a caching proxy should have
to pull a new copy of an unchanged file.

--
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com