[Yum] too many config files

[Michael Stenner]

On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 04:43:27PM -0600, Ed Brown wrote:
> where I can make use of variables in my calling scripts to supply server
> and repodir, and every client has the same, common yum.conf.
> 
> I think that it comes down to these questions: are there reasons why the
> policy and the repo urls can't be supplied on the command line?  Are
> there complications that make this unreasonable?  Otherwise, the
> requirement to contain this info in a text file is an unfortunate
> limitation on a great program, (requiring a lot of work by a lot of
> users, instead of, perhaps, a lot of work by the author/maintainer!)

The issue is basically the desire to balance power and flexibility
with simplicity.  Every option that's added to the command line
requires a little more code in the config section, more documentation,
and a little more thought to preserving backward compatibility.  For
any single option, these things are fairly minor (at least in cases
like this where you're mostly replicating config file options on the
command line) but you need to be a bit strict lest they creep in one
at a time.

This is not a right/wrong debate, but one of tradeoffs.  You're one
user who is trying to do something slighly exotic for which there are
a few clear (albeit slightly ugly) solutions.

I tend to agree with seth that putting each repo in its own included
file, and then having one top-level config file for each (that
includes the appropriate repos) is probably the cleanest way to go.

					-Michael
-- 
  Michael D. Stenner                            mstenner at ece.arizona.edu
  ECE Department, the University of Arizona                 520-626-1619
  1230 E. Speedway Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85721-0104                 ECE 524G