[Yum-devel] Looking for comments on Yum Fast Downloader and possible future enhancements in yum/yfd

seth vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Mon May 16 03:40:22 UTC 2011


On Sun, 2011-05-15 at 12:57 +0430, Hedayat Vatankhah wrote:
> Hi all,
> As you may already knew, still not having enough time to work on more 
> fundamental things, I've create a simple yum plugin[1] which tries to 
> take advantage of aria2c to provide faster downloads compared to current 
> URLGrabber. Currently, it is activated for downloading metadata dbs and 
> RPM packages. For the former, I override yum repo's _retrieveMD() 
> (calling the original function at the end to make sure that everything 
> is OK) and for the latter, I use a predownload hook.
> 
> First, any comments on the code is highly appreciated, specially as it 
> is my first serious yum code and it is not very long.
> 
> Then, suggestions for future enhancements are very welcome. I'm 
> specifically interested to be able to download metadata's in parallel, 
> and also downloading delta rpms. The latter is achievable by overriding 
> _getFile() when a whole file is going to be downloaded, but I would 
> prefer to find a solution which let me download multiple delta rpms in 
> parallel too. BTW, probably I should contact presto's author for this.
> 
> Anyway, I'm looking forward for any comments in this regard.
> 

A few things spring to mind:

1. downloading code in a plugin is always going to be plagued with
issues - especially for yum-utils or other things using yum - like from
a gui (yumex or pk).

2. you'll want to make sure you offer a lot/all of the same capabilities
of urlgrabber - things like certificate-based authentication does
actually matter.

3. Why not work on porting yum to using an external application call to
do downloads. If properly implemented, I think that code to make yum use
an external application to do downloads would be accepted into mainline
yum.


-sv






More information about the Yum-devel mailing list