On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 09:44:31 -0500 (EST), Robert G. Brown <rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > > > One of the major problems with yum as it is now is that yum configuration > > (specifying the set of repos you will query) is complicated. Yum users > > typically have to patch their local config whenever either (a) the > > dependency relationship between two repos changes, or (b) they want to > > add a new specialized repo (as, for example, the RealPlayer repo). > > I'm a little bit of a QA person, so I hope you'll pardon me for trying to separate the problem report from the suggested solution ;) Is the problem: "yum configuration files are complicated" Or is it more: "yum configuration files are generally fine, but can become complicated with dependency relationships and specilalized repositories" The first one seems like a non-issue to me. I've never even felt the need to RTFM about the formatting of those files because all the things I needed were readily apparent (granted that I'm a plain-vanilla user of the few distros I use). The second one I can grant is an issue and I'm not sure how to solve it. If we further break it down into: 1. dependency relationships complicate yum and 2. specialized repositories complicate yum and open you to security/versioning problems (which seems like a valid point from Robert) I don't know how to deal with problem 1 because I've never dealt with it in real life. Problem 2 seems like it could be helped with an "--all-repos" option for yum which would search your complete list of repositories and would default to a main list of repositories. That way, "yum install <package>" would give you the version packaged with your distro whereas "yum --all-repos install <obscure-package>" would search a much longer list of these twig repositories to find more obscure items. Eric- are these accurate representations of your problem? Does anyone have any other possible solutions? Greg
