[Yum] YUM's shortcomings

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On 15.02.2004 14:34, Jean Francois Martinez wrote:
> Yum has for now two serious shortcomings
> 
> 1) It has no browser, even a curses based one.  You cannot, like
> with apt or urpmi, browse what is available,  select what you are
> interested in and have it installed
> 
> 2) It does not deal with removable media.   Unlike what happens
> with apt or urpmi it will not prompt you for the CD containing
> what you need.  End result is that, since I have ADSL I often 
> end downloading packages I have on CD but no heart for going
> through the ordeal of hunting dependencies on three CDs.. 
> Copying everything on hard
> disk is a possibility but there are still plenty of boxes with
> 5 to 10 G disks where using 20% or more of disk space for keeping
> packages is not an option.  And plenty of people who have huge disks
> (80g or more) and who are psychologically disturbed about keeping whole
> distros on disk.
> 
> The problem of the huge download of headers is a PITA who only happens
> once.  The two problems I mentionned happen every day.
> 
> Are there any plans to fix them?

I wouldn't mind seeing yum remain a network-based updater. With 
various tools switching to using single repository format, you will 
be able to use up2date or system-config-packages to browse 
repositories and handle multiple removable media.

It's possible that this functionality will be added to yum in the 
future, but I don't think it should be the number one priority, and 
I disagree about these things being "major shortcomings." Yum is a 
tool for performing specific tasks -- namely, keeping a machine 
(most often unattended) updated via the network of available 
repositories. This is the reason why user-level interaction is not 
the primary focus of development.

Regards,
-- 
Konstantin ("Icon") Ryabitsev
Duke Physics Systems Admin, RHCE
I am looking for a job in Canada!
http://linux.duke.edu/~icon/cajob.ptml