IMHO, yum is behaving exactly as it should. When I disable a repository, yum has no idea why I have done it, and should not disregard my wishes and change anything about that repository. As for repositories that no longer have configurations, I don't want yum making any assumptions there, either. I have no problems going in and cleaning out the cache manually if space becomes an issue. It would be easy enough to create a cron job to do the job. If someone wants to create a script to go along with yum-utils or to stand alone, I would see nothing wrong with that. I'm sure that would be a welcomed idea. I also wouldn't complain about a '--sanitize' option in yum, but the current behavior is what I would expect and want.