Smartrpm was (Re: Fedora Core 4)

Andreas Hasenack andreas at conectiva.com.br
Thu Jan 20 19:06:52 UTC 2005


On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 11:40:21AM -0600, Michael Favia wrote:
> Apt downloads (or did) semi-large digests that contain information about
> the packages currently available on the repo (which is updated every

They are less in size than what yum downloads, because the pkglist file
used by apt doesn't have to list all files inside packages. yum downloads
rpm headers which can be as big as 600kb for a single package (read: tetex).
At least in my upgrade it showed me it was downloading 600kb of headers for
tetex. And afterwards it would download tetex itself, headers again of course.

> time the repo is updated) this digest is used to determine what is new
> and what dependencies exist between packages. Yum (recent versions at
> least) on the other hand downloads a brief (read: smaller) listing of
> the packages (with some meta data i think but not sure what) and then
> fetches the headers of the rpms independently to do dep resolution.

I just today tried yum from FC3 and here are my complaints (bear in mind that
these may have been addressed in a newer version: what I tested was from a
fresh FC3 install):
- yum update gives you absolutely no idea how long the download will take
- yum update is *really* verbose. You get pages and pages of data even before
  getting a list of packages which will be upgraded
- yum update can't be aborted: ctrl-c just aborts the current download and
  then yum proceeds to the next one where you have to press ctrl-c again and
  so on.
- after downloading lots of headers and after lots of screens filled with
  information yum finally showed me what packages would be upgraded/obsoleted/removed.
  Then the packages would be downloaded and, again, there was no indication of
  how long that would take. The ETA displayed was for each package, and not the
  whole download.
- yum update also doesn't tell you how big the download is in terms of size
  (how many megabytes?)

> I too was an apt user during fc1 and 2 but in the middle of fc2 i
> switched to yum because it is native, well supported and pretty well
> feature laden. I have issues with it like i do with most packages (and

I think that (being native which means it's the official update method for a
distro) is a very important reason. After all, the distro maintainers wouldn't
care if you had a problem with something outside their distro.




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