Issues with yum

[James Antill]

On Mon, 2012-02-27 at 17:45 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 11:56:12AM -0500, Genes MailLists wrote:
> > On 02/27/2012 11:44 AM, Sandro Mani wrote:
> > > 
> > will leave your system in a state where manual cleanup is likely
> > >> required.
> > > One scenario which I often hit is forgetting to change the proxy
> > > settings in yum.conf and then trying to update. Yum will clearly fail to
> > > download repodata, but it will keep trying for all mirrors it knows.
> > > Pressing ctrl+c there almost never works since yum only reacts to the
> > > signal when it is sent exactely in the instant between when it gave up
> > > downloading from one mirror due to timeout and beginning attempting to
> > > download from the next.
> > 
> >  Control-Z
> >  bg
> >  kill -9 %1
> 
> That's what I frequently have to do.  It *is* a bug in yum (and a very
> very long-standing one at that):

 Yeh, much like Fedora repodata is a yum bug.

 There are at least 3 classes of bugs here:

1. rpm overrides C-c handling when you do various rpm operations, so
sometimes what look like "simple" changes mean C-c stops working for
parts of yum.

2. DNS handing in Glibc eats C-c, so various network related things
sometimes mean you have a non-C-c working yum (just like "ping blah"
C-c). AFAIK the only fixes are "don't ever call anything in proc. that
can do a glibc DNS lookup" or "add threads".

3. pycurl/curl/nss also eat C-c ... at least sometimes, and maybe only
when using rpm as well.

...before #3 we generally did the debugging and fixed things as best we
could, and there were a few yum's that people could use where C-c worked
really well (IIRC the latest el5 one was one).
 But after #3 we had a lot of other problems in the same vein, so we
mostly gave up and are waiting for the downloads to not be in proc.
anymore. At which point it should mostly go away (hopefully we can get
rid of #2 as well ... so just need to be really careful about #1
problems).