[Yum] Running Yum Remotely

[Chris Betti]

As most of you know, running Yum with 128mb or less tends to swap a lot. 
I am running installs and updates with Yum 2.1.11 and FC3 on a P166 with 
64mb of memory and a slow disk. Running Yum any time I am waiting for 
the system is impossible, so currently I run overnight.

I had the idea of mounting a remote swap partition in a ramdisk on 
another system, but that seems like a risk. Do you think my concerns 
here are justified?

Another idea I had was running Yum remotely. For example, running Yum on 
a modern system with plenty of resources but telling it to calculate 
everything based on the old system. Is this feasible, perhaps with some 
work? Is Yum's code modular enough that it can serve information from 
the old system to the new system for dependency processing and XML 
processing with just a little work?

It would be great, no matter how it happens, to get Yum functionality on 
the old system. I could use apt-get, but I don't want to :-P

Thanks,
Chris Betti