Issues with yum

[elison.niven at gmail.com]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 12:12 PM, elison.niven at gmail.com
<elison.niven at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

I forgot to add:
8) Yum cannot use an iso image as a repo without mounting it.
Yast in suse allows to directly use iso images as repos.

Thanks and Best Regards,
Elison