Tag Archives: manager

Yum gets autoremove dependency feature

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Coming from a Gentoo/Debian background, one thing that has constantly bugged me on RPM based platforms like Fedora is the lack of decent, reliable dependency removal.

It seems so simple (and Debian has done it since the dawn of time) – if I install package x which pulls in dependencies y and z, then when I remove package x, I want to remove dependencies y and z, if they are not required by any other package.

Yes, there is the remove-leaves plugin for Yum and various RPM orphan checking tools, but in my experience, they are just not reliable.

So, I’m very happy to have discovered that Seth Vidal has merged orphaned dependency cleanup on removal into Yum. Hallelujah!

It’s in rawhide yum-3.2.28-13, and I’ll do some testing soon…

NetworkManager 0.8 to arrive shortly

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According to Phoronix, NetworkManager 0.8 has been flagged in the git repository and will be on the way shortly!

NetworkManager, the free software project that’s backed by Red Hat and used by many distributions for easily managing network connections
from the Linux desktop, is ready for its version 0.8 milestone. NetworkManager 0.7 is getting old and while NetworkManager 0.7.1 brought some improvements last year, the 0.8 release is rather exciting

Major improvements are better bluetooth support, integration with ModemManager, ipv6, and the removal of HAL (due to its deprecation).

Having Yum for Breakfast

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This week I decided to write a comparative article between Yum and Apt (the package managers). Using Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04, I performed various tests and benchmarked both the time and CPU usage they took. But why? Let me explain.

I really like the Fedora project. Really. I like their stance on proprietary drivers and codecs (and of course free software) and these days they seem to be pushing the technological envelope more than others. Sure Red Hat drives the direction of the project somewhat, but I don’t mind Red Hat either.

In fact, I wish I could use Fedora as my main distro! But every time I try it I just get so frustrated with Yum. Sure it’s better than up2date, but it’s so damn slow and annoying. That’s a problem for someone like me who manually updates his package database first thing every morning and checks to see what packages are available and updates the system by hand. Why do I do that? Cause I like to.

But every time I’ve tried to get into Fedora that damn package manager has stopped me. I get frustrated after a day or so. I think the longest I’ve had it on was 2 days before I switched.

Recently I installed Fedora 10 and 11 to see if there was any performance increase. Actually, to tell you the truth I was completely surprised by Yum’s agility and speed. The old Fedora I remember was not to be seen.. or so it felt like anyway.

Hence, I thought it might be good to run some tests to see.

Of course as the article points out, does any of this matter? Do we really need a fast a nimble package manager? Well for me it matters. It matters a great deal. For most users though they probably won’t care, as they just let the package manager do its thing in the background.

Still, it makes for some interesting thoughts. I think.