[Yum] Request for comment -- repository-level redirects

Greg Knaddison greg.knaddison at gmail.com
Wed Feb 2 15:20:52 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 09:44:31 -0500 (EST), Robert G. Brown
<rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> 
> > One of the major problems with yum as it is now is that yum configuration
> > (specifying the set of repos you will query) is complicated.  Yum users
> > typically have to patch their local config whenever either (a) the
> > dependency relationship between two repos changes, or (b) they want to
> > add a new specialized repo (as, for example, the RealPlayer repo).
> >

I'm a little bit of a QA person, so I hope you'll pardon me for trying
to separate the problem report from the suggested solution ;)

Is the problem: "yum configuration files are complicated"

Or is it more: "yum configuration files are generally fine, but can
become complicated with dependency relationships and specilalized
repositories"

The first one seems like a non-issue to me.  I've never even felt the
need to RTFM about the formatting of those files because all the
things I needed were readily apparent (granted that I'm a
plain-vanilla user of the few distros I use).

The second one I can grant is an issue and I'm not sure how to solve
it.  If we further break it down into:

1. dependency relationships complicate yum

and 

2. specialized repositories complicate yum and open you to
security/versioning problems (which seems like a valid point from
Robert)

I don't know how to deal with problem 1 because I've never dealt with
it in real life.  Problem 2 seems like it could be helped with an
"--all-repos" option for yum which would search your complete list of
repositories and would default to a main list of repositories.  That
way, "yum install <package>" would give you the version packaged with
your distro whereas "yum --all-repos install <obscure-package>" would
search a much longer list of these twig repositories to find more
obscure items.

Eric- are these accurate representations of your problem?

Does anyone have any other possible solutions?

Greg



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