Issues with yum

[elison.niven at gmail.com]

Fedora is a feature rich Linux distribution containing the latest advancements
in open source software and I simply love Fedora.

Why does Fedora still decide to use yum? The package management system of
Fedora is still very primitive.

Here are my reasons why yum needs to go or needs *major* changes:

1) yum's interface (command line) is non-interactive. I always fail to
understand why it is
taking so long. "Setting up update process" stays for more than 1 minute at
times! (On a fairly fast PC with high speed internet connection). Atleast it
should show the user some progress as to what it is doing.

2) Quitting by CTRL-C isn't very easy. Is it?

3) On 64-bit machines, there *always* come up some issues with i686 packages
and protected multilib versions.

4) I have used Fedora for more than 5 years, I have faced "Unable to retreive
repository information repomd.xml" for like infinite times. Yes, the error
eventually gets resolved but it still comes again and again.

5) Need for autocomplete to work properly in package name argument of command
line when pressing TAB. It is painfully slow.

6) yum requires to download repository information separately for each user.

7) yum is strangely clubbed with package-cleanup,
yum-complete-transaction and I don't know what else.

These are my ramblings about yum. I know I could have filed a few of the above
as bugs and may be help to resolve them, But someone really needs to address
the bigger issue that is yum's design philosophy rather than just solve bugs in
yum.

Rather than providing me workarounds or solutions to make it work better,
Fedora needs to recognise that yum is really a huge pain to work with.

I will share one experience I had. Yesterday I did yum --enable-repo=updates
update on Fedora 16. It gave me an error stating protected multi-lib versions
of a dozen or so packages. Running package-cleanup --clean-dupes
removed 691 packages
leaving my system crippled. It removed the entire KDE and also network manager.
Now I unable to login to GNOME shell and not able to connect to any network. I
had to take backup using recovery mode before proceeding to reinstall.

I now need to reinstall my operating system. Reason : yum screwed up.
And these are the issues only regarding to the command line yum, The
GUI front-end to yum has more issues.

I do not intend to criticise any of the developers but only suggest
that yum *really* needs major changes.
Keep up the good work.

Thanks and Best Regards,
Elison