[Yum-devel] [Fwd: Why yum do not continue partial metadata downloads?]

[Hedayat Vatnakhah]

Hi,
The first part of the email might be a bit unrelated here (?!), but 
anyway the second part is (IMHO) related to this list.

Thanks,
Hedayat

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Why yum do not continue partial metadata downloads?
Date: 	Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:16:26 +0430
From: 	Hedayat Vatnakhah <hedayat at grad.com>
To: 	yum-devel at lists.baseurl.org



Hi all,
Currently yum continues partial downloads when downloading packages, but
not for repository meta-data (e.g. primary.sqlite.bz2). It would be
really nice if this feature is added to all yum files downloads rather
than just RPM packages. It will improve the speed of yum on such
situations, specially for people with slow internet connection (or some
slow/busy mirrors). Let me bring an example:
Today, I decided to install a small plymouth theme package. So, I issued
a 'yum install plymouth-theme-sp*' command. Yum decided to update its
meta-data for Fedora updates repository and started to get its
primary.sqlite file (which was 2.5 MB and is relatively small compared
to the Fedora repository's pribary.sqlite, where the problem is much
bigger). At the first try, it downloaded about 1/3 of the file and then
timed out. It started from scratch with another mirror to download the
file, and it timed out again after downloading 2.1MB. It started again,
and downloaded almost all of the file (around 99% I think) and timed out
again! (I'm using a dial-up internet connection at home). Well, that was
really frustrating, so I decided to go with 'yum --disablerepo=updates
install plymouth-theme-sp*' and fortunately no dependency problems
happened. Also, the package I wanted was just around 67KB...
You can guess how much trouble I had to download Fedora repository's
metadata (for this reason I added metadata_expire=-1 for Fedora
repository as I don't like to get those files again.).
It is also one of the good reasons I have for not using PackageKit when
a really fast Internet connection is not available, since it don't tell
the user how the process of downloading repository metadata is going (it
might get 'timed out' for ever!).

Something a bit unrelated: I found some emails in this mailing list's
archives (in 2007) about patches for supporting delta metadata files.
This is a topic which I'm really interested in, and I'm thinking about
it for awhile (But I don't have any experience in yum development now,
and also not much free time). But I want to know about their status. Are
they available in Yum code repository? What is remaining for them to
become finished and usable? Maybe I could put some time on this issue soon.

Thanks a lot,
Hedayat


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