Issues with yum

[James Antill]

On Mon, 2012-02-27 at 19:22 +0530, elison.niven at gmail.com wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27 12:13:07 UTC 2012, Josh Boyer jwboyer at gmail.com wrote
> 
> >> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 1:44 AM, elison.niven at gmail.com:
> >> 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.
> 
> > You also forgot to add:
> 
> > 1) A proposed alternative
> I am more than happy to propose alternatives.
> Alternative 1 : Use a totally different package management system : apt-get
> It is mature enough. I know this is going to be rejected totally even
> without consideration.

 Have you actually used apt on Fedora?
 The main benefit apt on Debian/Ubuntu has is that the repodata is very
different, making repodata updates much faster. It also helps that only
Debian unstable updates as much as Fedora stable.

> Alternative 2 :
> Make the following changes to yum to make yum better:
> 1) yum should maintain status of installed packages locally. And it
> should not need to fetch repository information when user tries
> yum info <installed-package>
> Reason to have this feature : It seems logical to have information
> about an installed package locally.

 AFAIK the following will only look at the local data:

 yum --nocolor info installed blah

> 2) yum is currently downloading repository information separately for each user.
> It can use the same downloaded repository information for all users.

 Kind of, we used to have non-root users use root's cache ... but that
caused lots of annoying problems.
 I "have a plan" for Fedora 18, that should make things better. We'll
see.

> 3) Show progress in "Setting up update process" or "Setting up install process".
> At present, users cannot know that is it working or sleeping.
> Reason to have this feature : Better user experience

 There is a significant delay between these two pieces:

Setting up Upgrade Process
Resolving Dependencies

...is this when you are doing a full "yum upgrade" or upgrading a
specific package too? How long is the delay?