Yum Bitching

It can be quite discouraging to type “yum update” and have yum simply go off forever. Among other things, one must wait a great long time to distinguish this behavior from yum’s normal mode of operation. Other times, it comes back very quickly with a message saying, for all practical purposes, “RPM crashed, you lose, sorry.”

via LWN.net (subscription required)

Jonathan Corbet normally manages to amuse me on a weekly basis, but this time he’s outdone himself. Consider my LWN.net subcription renewed for another year.

Update: I;ve been convinced to include a subscriber link to the article for those without LWN.net subscriptions. http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/210373/8badbe4f9c463fb8/

4 comments

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Thank $deity for apt. Why distros still are doing the sandbox "my shovel" thing and don't adopt it all over the board is the strangest thing ever. Well, at least they get their daily punishment for being stubborn, thanks to yum.

I know this isn't really a common use-case, but when I was investigating Xen last I used to create lots of micro-VMs, with 16M of memory each. This was not enough to invoke yum.

I think the comments in this bug illustrate some of the underlying 'problems' with rpm  maintenance mentioned in the lwn article:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=119185