[Yum] some thoughts on yum

[kenneth topp]

On 30 Jun 2003, seth vidal wrote:

> On Sun, 2003-06-29 at 13:29, kenneth topp wrote:
> > 1) I used to comment out baseurl to have yum skip over a repo, but that 
> > generates a stacktrace now:
> > 
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> >   File "/usr/bin/yum", line 45, in ?
> >     yummain.main(sys.argv[1:])
> >   File "yummain.py", line 106, in main
> >   File "yummain.py", line 65, in parseCmdArgs
> >   File "config.py", line 123, in __init__
> >   File "config.py", line 247, in _doreplace
> > TypeError: expected string or buffer
> > 
> 
> I should catch the error - but commenting out a baseurl is not enough to
> remove the repo entry.

it used to be.. what would it do with an entry otherwise?

> > 4) allow users to generator .hdr files when there isn't a repo..  If I
> > point yum at a directory full of rpms, why can't it just make .hdr files
> > and not require any server side setup at all?  It seems that both ftp and
> > http support retrieving byte ranges, this would be nice as then all
> > directories with rpms in it are yum repos..  It seems that any yum setup
> > on servers should be optional..
> 
> it's not sensible and it's expensive - it's not a mode of operation I
> find to be interesting - if someone else wants to implement it fine -
> I'll look at it - but it's not as trivial as it seems at first glance
> and its not terribly useful.
> 
> yum-arch /some/local/path
> baseurl=file:///some/local/path
> 
> just as good - I use it for local rpms I want. I have a standing repo
> called local that I can throw rpms in, run yum-arch . on them and be
> done. as a dir it gets horribly crufty but <shrug> I clean it out once
> every month or so.

i guess I'll look and see how expensive it is..  For schools and 
corporations and the like I guess it's not useful, but for me, it turns 
every directory full of .rpms on the net into a repo, which is quite 
useful for me.  I can point yum right at ftp.redhat.com, or any official 
mirror, or redhat cd's, or whatever else..

> 
> > 5) what is the point of keeping .hdr files in /var/cache that are no
> > longer on the server? (debugging?, saves d/ling everything again if a repo
> > was flakey?) Whatever it is, it shouldn't be the default...
> 
> yum clean old-headers.
> 
> removing them each time doesn't really help all that much especially
> considering how little space they use and sometimes you'll find you're
> removing and deleting the same headers A LOT if you did it each time.
> 

well after a couple months I got up to 300MB, and cleaning it (just "yum
clean") got me down to 60MB.  Why do you think I'd be removing the same
entries a lot?  Perhaps there is a way that we can remove the files don't 
correspond to files available on the server anymore?  I don't see why yum 
must require maintance.


> -sv
> 

thanks for the good tool..