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

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 16:00 -0700, Kam Leo wrote:
> 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.

For those of us on 1 Mbps (shared among several machines in the home)
the equation is different. I'm sure people on dialup feel this even more
strongly.

poc