I was wondering why fedora has choosen yum over apt-get

[seth vidal]

> Can yum (correct me if it does already):
> 
> 1) compress the .hdr files
> 2) Use HTTP 1.1 Pipelining or keepalive support?

it does both of these already.

The headers are just too big. When I originally wrote yum it was for my
environment. My environment is terribly over-bandwidth'd. 
So downloading 7MB of headers via http took < 15s.

And since the full download of 7MB of headers only really happens ONCE,
I never saw the problem.

now I do, now I'm working on a solution.

I've been working with the other pkg mgmt people (apt-rpm, apt-deb, red
carpet, yum, up2date, anaconda, rpmfind, system-config-packages, rpm) on
a format for metadata that, ideally, we could all share and use.

We worked out a format that we're mostly happy with and I've posted
about here, multiple times, before:
http://linux.duke.edu/metadata/readme.metadata

I've been working on making yum work with this format. I hope to have
some test releases out before the end of February, we'll see if I can do
it.

the goal is to have an xml file that describes the pkg metadata. This
would be one file, substantially smaller than the headers, and much
simpler to check out and cache.

some samples are up at:
http://linux.duke.edu/metadata/

so now, instead of downloading the hdrs it would download the xml and
work from there.

In the best of all words, the metadata format (since it is not specific
to any package manager)  would be usable by all of them and then mirrors
would be able to have a single format for all the pkg mgmt tools.

That's what I'd like to see happen.

-sv