[Yum] state of the yum

[seth vidal]

Hi all,
 I'm making a post to organize my thoughts and to let everyone know
where things are with yum and plans or ideas that might come out in yum.

Stuff - things that I thought were interesting/happy points

Needing Love Stuff - things I thought need to be fixed - points of
irritation for me

Soon Stuff - things I want done soon, things that may already be in
process, part of the way done, etc

Middling Stuff - stuff in the middle distance away - these are being
thought out/discussed etc, none of them are in stone

Farther Stuff: You might consider these wishlist - some of them are just
hard, others are waiting on other things to materialize. Some are just
odd bits

Misc Stuff: Things that need to be done but I've not done them mostly
b/c I'm horribly lazy and/or busy.

Docs Stuff:  Docs that need writing/examples

Stuff:
Yum is working for what seems like a fair number of people on a fairly
diverse set of architectures and linux distros.

The number of yum repositories is a good lot and there are probably a
lot more I don't know about.

The number of people contributing code and ideas is going up.


Needing Love Stuff:
- the nevral needs to be written up newer to support multiple providing
versions as well as version-specific erasure and multilib for the coming
64bit onslaught! :)
- logger needs to be swapped out for the syslog-ing implementation of it
- yummain.py needs to be simplified in a variety of ways to let more
installation frameworks be strapped on top of it
- clientStuff.py needs to be stripped of most of its functions and/or
broken up into classes.

Soon Stuff:
- yum search will get implemented and should be nice
- yum kickstart-like scripting mechanism for transactions(install,
remove, update, groups, etc)
- cached actions should be much more obviously implemented and should 
behave better, therefore making searches, lists and provides better

Middling Stuff
- handling of src.rpms on the server side so work can more readily begin
on the client side
- abstract the kernel-handling stuff so scripts can be run on arbitrary
package transactions not just kernels
- More polite exception handling so bug reporting can be more easily
facilitated
- preprocessing over config file to handle include=

Farther Stuff:
- YumException for capturing any sys.exit(1) calls more gracefully.
- refine repo concept to allow arbitrary repo selection on the command
line and some concept of default, disabled, enabled, etc in the repo
definition
- ngds to speed up the dep resolution - dependent on storage mechanisms
  - yum list deps [packagename]
  - yum list deps updates
  - other interesting things like that
- yum localinstall myfile.noarch.rpm
- handle transaction rollbacks
- do gpg key importing from the command line.
- verify pkgs by gpg signatures and by specific signatures
- make yum-arch present functional lists of common unresolved
dependencies in a repository for relative dep closure.
- figure out how a good way to do pkg ordering to work with cdrom
installations complete with prompting for change of disks, etc.

Misc Stuff:
- install-only-packages option under [main] for pkgs that should be
'installed' never 'updated' - ie: kernels, kernel modules, etc
- make new kernel default option - this should probably happen when the
kernel updating stuff is abstracted to handle arbitrary packages
- rpm.setlogfile should be implemented to help logging
- sanity checking on .hdrs and rpmdb and other things should happen to
clean up broken bits that people cause by doing evil things like --force
and --nodeps to rpm

Doc Stuff:
- yumgroups should be better documented to explain just how cool it can
be :)
- more examples of how to effectively use yum -c url://server/path
mechanism to do cool tweaky things
- more examples of how to setup your own local repositories for your
systems
- once available the script/kickstart stuff will need examples.

So. I know this was a long list but if you find any of these things
interesting or have already implemented some of them and care to send me
a patch please do so. If you'd just like to comment on some of these
ideas/problems that is also encouraged. The things above should not be
seen as a roadmap or specifc plan, it is a list of things I thought
about tonight, not much else. if you suggested something and I left it
out it's b/c I'm not done thinking about it or, as is more likely the
case, I forgot it. :)

Thanks :)

-sv