since this is a critical part of getting basic yum to work properly, there's a few things i'd like to clarify. (and i won't quibble over terminology for now.) first, what's the rationale for multiple [server] entries in /etc/yum.conf? just for redundancy? or, from what i can see, different [server]s can have different groupings of RPMs. as in base, updates and so on. so this would represent a mutually exclusive set of [server]s, or maybe not? and related to the above, what about multiple baseurl's? again, just for redundancy, which is what it appears. next, should all [server] entries in a single yum.conf be appropriate for that linux box? as in, if i'm on a RH 9 system, should *every* single [server] entry in my yum.conf file refer to a RH 9 repository? what if it doesn't? is yum smart enough to realize something is amiss? or is this just undefined and probably really boneheaded behaviour? (as an analogy, most folks know they can have a single, global /etc/sudoers file that's appropriate for all hosts in an organization. can the same be done for a single, global /etc/yum.conf file? i'm guesssing not.) third, what if a baseurl doesn't represent an actual URL? as in, when i tried playing with yum earlier, from my severn box, the $releasever variable seemed to be "9.0.93", while the corresponding repository at dulug was, instead, "severn". this caused a simple "yum list" to fail, even after i added a valid (download.fedora.us) 9.0.93 yum repository at the end of that file. should i have expected this behaviour? why wouldn't yum not just give up on the bad baseurl and keep on going? finally, i'm guessing that one can incorporate the [server] value in subsequent commands, yes? rather than let yum just start at the top, i recall someone earlier mentioning "grouping", but i have no idea what that is, so i might be way off base. (that is, i skimmed the options and arguments to the "yum" command, and i didn't immediately see any invocations that involved actually specifying an individual [server] name.) slowly getting a clearer picture, rday
