[CentOS] Why is yum not liked by some?

Thu Sep 15 00:44:51 UTC 2005
Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>

On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 19:00 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 14:33, 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/
> 
> I've mostly used the Centos 3.x version so far.  And believed the
> philosophy section of the yum README file where it said the
> dependency decisions were made based on the contents of 
> the hdr files...  Will any or all of apt/up2date/yum do the
> right thing if you ask it to install a version of a package
> that is in the repository but not the most current. I was under the
> impression that yum could do that, but have not been able
> to with the yum version in Centos 3.5.
> 
The new versions of yum and smartpm use the repomd (repodata directory)
info for updates.  Neither will use the old (headers) directory
structure.
-----------
Up2date still uses the old (headers) directory structure.
----------
Apt (i386 only, because of no multi-lib arch support) uses this
structure:
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/apt/i386/

These are just symlinks to places in the main tree and apt metadata is
in the base directory.  Apt is no longer being maintained upstream (they
are now doing smartpm), but we will maintain the repo for i386.  Smartpm
can use either the apt tree or the yum repomd tree.
--------
We have an FAQ that discusses upgrades from CentOS-3.x to CentOS-4.x.
The CentOS team does not recommend an upgrade via yum, apt or up2date.
You can see our recommendation (and a link to a forum thread that
explains how to do an upgrade via the non-recommended way too) here:

http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=27
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