This is really just a comment and some suggestions -- yum in FC 4 is
simply lovely. I can see that a lot of suggestions made on list, such
as autoretrieval of GPG keys, are now implemented making the use of
gpgcheck natural instead of difficult -- easy for the expert, possible
for the newbie. repos are now very easy to manage as well (for the
expert) and still automagical enough for most newbies.
One suggestion (for the FC4-based linux@duke but also for other people
running FC4 repo mirrors plus local extensions). At least some
repositories, notably livna (which religiously goes on top of FC4
base+updates+extras and is apparently maintained by a lot of the FC
developers to provide a channel for those otherwise patent-encumbered
packages that we often need and that are actually legal for us to use,
but that RH cannot safely support in the distro itself) provide a lovely
rpm that basically contains their repo entry:
livna-release-4-0.lvn.2.4.noarch.rpm
Installing this rpm instantly enables yum to access e.g. nvidia and ATI
drivers all RPM packaged and ready to go and updated per FC kernel,
xmms-mp3, and other tidbits. My suggestion is that this (and perhaps
others like it) is an excellent candidate for e.g. add-ons/duke (or
equivalent elsewhere). So that one can go:
yum install livna-release-4
followed by
yum install xmms-mp3
to add something like this to a system. It's probably dangerous to add
a package group of repo rpms since I'd guess that adding ten repos would
lead to interesting and possibly dangerous collisions, but having the
repo rpms themselves available in a repo collection for a site makes it
easy to extend particular hosts without having to e.g. mirror part of
livna into a local add-on repo.
I also wanted to cheer for repoview. Awesome. I used to have to do yum
info \* > /tmp/yum.info to get an idea of what was available, but
repoview makes this sort of thing obsolete. I'd go so far as to suggest
integrating it with createrepo so it's a one-stop shop. I can't imagine
anyone NOT wanting to create an index.html of their entire repository --
even if it will be a local-disk only repo a) it's harmless and wastes a
trivial amount of space; b) it isn't a waste of space as web browsers
work just fine to a local disk as well.
It's getting hard for me to see places where yum could be substantively
improved. Debugged, sure (if there are any meaningful bugs left).
Documentation can always be improved or extended. GUI front ends for
various tasks (e.g. building and maintaining the repo directory and
yum.conf) sure, fine. But yum itself is really close to being ready to
freeze for all time as a low level tool.
Kudos to the developers.
rgb
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