stop stupidly telling people to do "yum clean all" when it's not necessary

[Kam Leo]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 3:43 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 14:34 -0700, Alan Evans wrote:
>> I have myself found that "yum clean all" apparently fixes many
>> problems even when I'm not sure why it should. When I have a problem
>> updating, I usually start with cleaning the cache and metadata just to
>> establish a baseline. Ninety percent of the time, this first step
>> makes my problem go away. But apparently that approach means I'm
>> stupid.
>
> Have you tried "yum clean metadata" in any of these cases, rather than
> "yum clean all"? If not, how do you know that the former would not have
> worked?
>
> My personal experience is that cleaning metadata has *always* fixed
> problems without the need for cleaning the cache. That may not be
> everyone's experience, but it is mine. Even if it doesn't always work,
> it is always faster, and doesn't stop you cleaning the cache later if
> you need to. IOW the sensible procedure is:
>
> yum clean metadata
> iff that doesn't solve the problem: yum clean all
>
> poc

That's two operations! My personal experience is that very few
packages are in the yum package cache when I encounter a problem.. I
have an acceptable speed network connection (8 MBits/S) so the cost of
re-downloading packages is not a big factor for me.  The "clean all"
option is more efficient for me than iteratively going through the
"clean" options one at a time.