Hello Seth, I'm new to this list, but I've been on the freshrpms list for quite a while now, and I've been using yum happily since I noticed it being used by up2date - I dropped up2date soon afterwards. I much prefer it to apt for several reasons: - it's a *lot* closer to rpm (uses rpm headers usw.) - very few *problems* (grep freshrpms.list for both yum and apt ...) - easy repo creation (saves multiple downloads in local network) Sadly there are a few repos I'd like to use, if it weren't for their incompatabilty with more cooperative repos. My solution is to rebuild from srpm, after reading and perhaps modifying the spec file. So I'd like to be able to get the srpms as easily as I can get the rpms. Would you be interested in a patch for yum to download and maybe install srpm's ? I googled around lists.dulug.duke.edu, seems like no-one's implemented that yet, unless I missed something. It's my very first attempt at Python hacking, so it's too rough as it is, but after looking at a few Python docs and tutorials, Python looks like a *nice* OO-Scripting language ... Since it's neither my first programming nor my first scripting language, that shouldn't be a problem. - ok, I admit we really did have a card-punch and reader at my *very* first IT-job ... ;-) The download works, I have a solvable problem with the srpm install using the Python rpm classes. At the moment it's a hack on yum-2.0.7-3.1.fc.fr.src.rpm from freshrpms, but I'd be happy to port it to cvs and maintain / develop it further if you're interested. It'd give a focus to learning Python, which, as I mentioned, I *like*. I'd need your thoughts / help on how to fit it cleanly into the existing yum architecture to do it. Fred.