Ideas for yum

[Rahul Sundaram]

Martin Marques wrote:
> When I first used yum, FC1, it did lots of things I really didn't like, 
> being the worst the download of all the repo metadata each time yum was 
> executed. Very bad behavior.
> 
> At that time I started using smart which was quite promising but now I 
> see it as a real hog. Don't know if it's due to smart, rpm or the rpm 
> meta data structure (XML parsing can be quite resource consuming).
> 
> So I tried yum yesterday and found some nice things since.
> 
> Three things I found lacking (of haven't found how to configure) in 
> latest versions of yum are:
> 
> 1) Preferences for repositories, so that a package in more then one 
> repository will always try to keep the one from a specific repository. I 
> saw an option in yum.conf, pkgpolicy, which is not documented, and the 
> little doc I found on the web wasn't very enlightening.

You want yum priorities plugin available in Fedora Extras. Some docs at 
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities

> 2) Search gives to much information: One line with a brief description 
> is enough. And it repeats it self: If the same package is in core, 
> updates and freshrpms I get it three times.

Yum list | grep <package> tends to work better if you are searching for 
the package name instead of the metadata.

> 3) A policy of installation would be good to have, so befor installing a 
> package you know where it comes from, and what installed package will be 
> replaced in case of an upgrade.

Yum does list these information on yum list and yum update.

Rahul