> From: Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs@xxxxxxxxxxx> > Subject: Re: explanation of yum.cron + a little frustration. > To: akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx > Cc: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx> > Message-ID: <ufaslxc8cv8.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > >>>>> "a" == akonstam <akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > a> Look, I appretiate that people answer my questions but why won't > a> some on tell me the answer to this question. > > That's a great way to elicit killfile additions instead of help, but > I'll persist. > > a> I asume the last line in the script does a yum update. > > To be clear, I believe you refer to this line: > > /usr/bin/yum -R 10 -e 0 -d 0 -y shell /etc/yum/yum-daily.yum > > A quick perusal of the yum manual page tells what the arguments mean: > > -R 10 -- wait a random amount of time, up to ten minutes > -e 0 -- print only critical errors > -d 0 -- turn off debugging > -y -- assume a "yes" answer to any prompts > shell /etc/yum/yum-daily.yum > -- process yum commands from /etc/yum/yum-daily.yum > To be fair to Aaron, who is a pretty helpful guy in these parts, the man pages do not describe what 'shell' does. It is not included as one of the arguments to yum or one of its commands. Nor does the info page, which looks like the same information. I think that's the crux of his question. yum --help includes 'shell' as the last option in a long line of BNF options, but does not explain what it does either. To understand, you must run 'yum shell' and ask for help inside it. Not easy to do if you don't know the shell is there. And it is not readily apparent that yum includes its own shell; at first I thought that since there's no shell mentioned in the man page, that yum was invoking the Python shell to provide arguments. But 'ts run' isn't in the man pages either as an argument or yum command. Like Aaron, I was seriously mystified at all of this. I only figured it out by typing the command at the bash prompt and watching (open-jawed) as yum offered me a shell! Although I can understand the usage of a shell for yum interactively, I agree with Aaron that it's very complicated to use it for yum-daily.yum. Don't blast him on this question. The point has been made in another post that this allows sysadmins the ability to modify the overnight yum update. Sounds good, but what else would you do besides installing updates or populating a local repo? Yum can do many things, but usually I want to be there when it does them. If anyone has a suggestion, or better, an example, for how you could profitably modify yum-daily.yum, I would be grateful to see it. Erik
