[fedora-india] Usability Pondering- Yum

[steve]

Hi Ashok,

Ashok Gautham wrote:
> When I use yum and install software, N is the default choice.
> I feel that from usability perspective, yes should be the default
> value. I wanted to know if there was any motive behind this
> strange choice. Or was it that the developers of yum felt people
> would use install instead of info or deplist?
> 
yum automatically resolves dependencies and updates, installs (and sometimes 
even uninstalls) packages when asked to install/update a package. Due to these 
'side-effects' it is always a good thing to question the user.

This is the reason why yum has an interactive prompt and rpm doesn't.

Of course if you are absolutely certain no harm can come from 
installing/updating a package and all it's dependencies, it does offer the '-y' 
flag (or the 'assumeyes' option in yum.conf(5) for the really brave ...or really 
stupid).

> (However, I do feel that no must the be default as it is for
> removal of packages)
> 
> Also, I feel that for a system, one version of a package that has
> been downloaded should be kept on the hard disk and could
> be overwritten by the next release of the package. If a user
> installs a package and then uninstalls it and finally reinstalls it,
> he should not be redownloading the package. I find that only
> the downloaded and yet-to-be-installed packages are present
> in /var/cache/yum/*. The manpage of yum tells me that they are
> not automatically removed. But I found them to be automatically
> deleted after they have been installed(Fedora11)
> 

> On further probing, I found keepcache to be set to 0 in
> /etc/yum.conf. This contradicts with the manpage.
> 
Seems like a bug in the man page, since IMHO keepcache=0 is a more general 
preference.

cheers,
- steve


-- 
why procrastinate when you can perendinate ?