[Yum-devel] Re: makecache process

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Fri, 2005-04-11 at 14:03 -0800, Greg Knaddison wrote:
> My impression is that people don't know about  yum shell - I think
> it's a marketing problem more than anything.
> 
> Unless you really like this whole caching and 'cookie' idea and want
> to implement it, I'd say let's document the shell a little better and
> point people at that.

I don't think you will succeed. "Yum shell", while a useful tool, goes
against the paradigm of command-line utilities, and so will probably
meet lots of resistance from users. I mean, there isn't another popular
CLI tool that expects you to drop into its own console and learn its
semantics in order to do things. The only one I can think of is "bc" and
that behaviour is actually something to be expected for a calculator
program.

I think that having a "cookie" mechanism would be far more user-friendly
and immediately beneficial than trying to teach every user in the
RH-universe about the usefulness of "yum shell". It's also not difficult
to implement, so the argument of "more code" doesn't really outweigh the
benefits in this case.

-K