On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 19:21, Jonathan Gardner wrote: > On Thursday 20 May 2004 11:22 am, billg wrote: > > I used up2date immediately after FC2 installtion yesterday with no > > problems or delays. Five packages were installed. > > > > Earlier today, I attempted to install a single package using yum: yum > > install <packagename>. > > > > Yum was very, very slow. If I didn't know better, as a new user might > > not, I would've assumed that it had crashed. Yum also began to downoad > > headers for several packages other than the paclage I had requested. I > > terminated yum before it completed. > > > > Yum takes its sweet time downloading all new headers. I would rather have a > backend cron running every night or so that gets the headers, and have yum > the app default to not downloading headers, with an option to download the > headers if needed. Ergh, this is a bit of fud I fear :( >From man yum. -C Tells yum to run entirely from cache - does not download or update any headers unless it has to to perform the requested action. check-update Implemented so you could know if your machine had any updates that needed to be applied without running it interactively. Returns exit value of 100 if there are packages available for an update. Also returns a list of the pkgs to be updated in list format. Returns 0 and no packages are available for update. If you run "chkconfig --level 345 yum on" this will configure your system to run nightly updates, which in turn will also update the headers, so when you come to running yum during the day it shouldn't have to download new headers, apart from the ones released that day (or of course you can just use the -C option. > > Two questions, then: > > > > 1) Is yum's unresponsiveness due to mirror load? If so, why wasn't > > up2date slow? Just dumb luck? Do they not look at the same > > repositories? > > > > The first time you use Yum, it has to get a lot of data. Again this is not necessarily true, for the base packages (other repo's it is the case). >From man yum.conf usecachedb boolean - defaults to 1. This tells yum to use, if present, the rpmdb present in the path specfied in the cachedb option to prime the header cache. cachedb path to complete rpmdb for your distro - typically contained in the rpmdb-yourdistro package. defaults to /usr/lib/rpmdb/$basearch-redhat-linux/redhat/ I would think for a workstation/desktop install it may be a good idea for these to be installed and configured at boot, and may be nice if the other repo's created their own rpm's for the above two, and had it in their FAQ, but I'm fairly certain that most people would still complain. Doug