[Yum-devel] makecache process

[seth vidal]

Hey folks,
 A lot of the complaints we've most recently heard have been that
parsing and handling metadata takes too long and that people would
rather not have to sit through it on each command. So it seems the
existence of the shell is not enough - oh well. 

So I was thinking of something Icon said and I was talking with him and
Paul and I think maybe we have part of a solution.

A simple yum-util that would do a cache update from cron every N hours.
Then modify yum so that if repomd.xml (or a variable inside it) is < N
hours old then assume that repo is current and use the local store of
it.

We would also need to add a more informative message to yum to let the
user know what's going on if the yum lockfile is engaged while the
metadata is being read in for the regular run.

It seems to me that in most cases we would be avoiding the repomd.xml
download/check and the metadata parse. It would also buy us (for systems
that have persistent connections, that is) the ability to assume that
the local cache is reasonably correct. This means some more yum-utils to
have quick-responses from the complete metadata cache.

I'll work on this tonight while I'm messing around. 

If anyone has any suggestions for more things to add around this, let me
know - but I think it might just work/help.

Thanks,
-sv