Comments on: Having Yum for Breakfast

By: loved_redhat5-9

loved_redhat5-9 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:55:04 +0000

>I really like the Fedora project. Really.
Why do so many of us have to start our posts and list-msgs with such statements? it’s telling. If you really liked it, you wouldn’t have to qualifiy it like that.

I’ve used redhat in the old days. It was my system. It worked and I could live with it’s small deficiencies. I’ve been burned by yum, so many times, I hate it and I’ve come to hate the community/company that pushes it. It’s stupid. I dream of a day when seth vidal screams at everyone who’s complaining and finally gives up on this bastard of a pkg management. yum is NIH.

use puppy, woof, astrumi, stilax, pclinuxos even ubuntu/opensuse. cut the crap and stop using fedora.

one angry ex-redhat user.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:32:55 +0000

Great, thanks a lot. I’ll do that and have another play

Cheers,
Chris

By: Rahul Sundaram

Rahul Sundaram — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:21:03 +0000

There is a fairly good set of tips and tricks at

http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2008/04/12-yum-tips-and-tricks.html

The things I personally do,

yum install yum-fastestmirror yum-presto

set the metadata_expiry in /etc/yum.conf to expire every day instead of every 6 hours. If you want apt like behaviour, set it to zero instead. Also check out yum-updatesd. Yum because it is in python and because it has to deal with a lot more metadata will still be slower but in practise, it doesn’t really matter much anymore. The trade off is a lot more flexibility including a every growing list of very useful plugins that can be done within a few hours.

Try yum list yum\* on a Fedora system.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:50:20 +0000

Hey Rahul,

Thanks for the information and link. I’d be interested in more tips like this, do you know of a “tweak Yum” howto?

Cheers,
Chris

By: Rahul Sundaram

Rahul Sundaram — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:35:52 +0000

Yum and Apt is not working with the same metadata. RPM has a lot more metadata than Deb does. For example, with RPM you can mark certain files as dependencies instead of package names and you can do yum install /usr/bin/foo.

yum search foo and apt-cache search foo isn’t the same thing either. apt-cache works off the cache. If you want the same thing, you need yum -C search foo and you can modify metadata_expiry setting to higher value if you want somewhat apt like behaviour.

Also from Seth Vidal, yum developer

http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/yum-benchmarks/

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:26:23 +0000

Sure, I have all that information and at some point I’ll post it up. Of course you can replicate your own set of tests and see. For example, just time “yum search package” and compare the results to time “apt-cache search package”, etc.

-c

By: Finalzone

Finalzone — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:48:45 +0000

What are missing in the posted article is a detailed methodology that include the list of packages used for these, transaction log that include time function (time foo bar command), all setup for both apt and yum so other packager can reproduce the benchmark.

Without them, I question the validity of the benchmark because there are a lot of factors influencing the result.