[FALSE ALARM] Re: yum update and f12

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:16:13 -0700, Paul wrote:

> >> When you run "yum update", watch out for more plugins. From time to time
> >> there are users who are hit by non-default plugins which exclude 
> >> thousands
> >> of packages due to misconfiguration or bugs.
> >
> > Michael:
> >
> > Can you elaborate a bit? I am rhinking that you might be focusing your 
> > comments on the "blacklist" and "whiteout" comments (???) and I have 
> > been operating under the assumption that, short of 
> > Nvidia/Nouveau/blacklist, there isn't anything in these messages that 
> > I need to worry about. I've seen presto and packagelist and have 
> > always assumed they are part of yum and therefore safe.

I explicitly referred to "more plugins", but at a second thought their
names would have been printed by 'yum -v repolist' already, too. There are
optional plugins for Yum, see 'yum list yum-plugin\*', and not all of them
are safe to use because they can cause problems when they are not set up
correctly or suffer from bugs. From time to time there are users, who
cannot update (or don't see the latest packages), because a plugin warns
about excluding thousands of packages. This is not the case for you,
however.

> Of course, when I go back to the machine to do the "yum clean metadata", 
> I notice that after 2+ hours of being online, it "suddenly" has a notice 
> that there are 521 updates that I need. Fired off "yum update" and it is 
> taking its sweet time doing lots and lots of updates ... as I would have 
> expected after not doing such since 14feb10.
> 
> Patience clearly was not exercised on my part ...

Difficult to comment on as guess-work is needed. A "notice that there are
521 updates" sounds like you keep running PackageKit (or yum-updatesd) as
they create notifications for available updates.
The Yum default for metadata_expire is 1.5 hours. Yum would only revisit
the remote repositories to check for new metadata, if your locally cached
metadata are older than 1.5 hours. Since you had last used your machine in
Feb, the metadata have been a lot older than 1.5 hours, and Yum would have
visited the remote repos during your first "yum update" already (or
immediately with a "yum clean metadata ; yum update" as then it would _have_
had to redownload all repositorys' metadata to do anything at all).
As why it managed to find new packages in the metadata after 2+ hours, now
it's much too late to examine it further. You actually saw this already
for the yum repolist output you posted,

| Repo-id      : updates
| Repo-name    : Fedora 12 - i386 - Updates
| Repo-status  : enabled:
| Repo-updated : Fri Jul 16 11:18:05 2010

which means you've had the Updates metadata from July 16th.