On Thu, 30 Dec 2004 22:36:29 -0800, Jamie Zawinski <jwz@xxxxxxx> wrote: > So my questions are: > > - Is there some way to make yum cache all that crap? I'd be > perfectly ok with it just reusing the same repository data > for days at a time. Certainly there's no need to re-download > it every single time I invoke yum. Are you sure its not caching? /var/cache/yum/base/*.pickle should exist, and those pickle files are cached versions of the binary data python needs in a form already interpretted from the xml. I naively assume they are created using python's pickle module http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/pytut/tut_58.html My understanding is ==== hash bars are downloads and ###### hash bars are reading things into memory. repomd.xml is a very very small file and its used to get the checksums of the important metadata files... like primary and filelists, with are used for dependancy resolution. repomd is what is downloaded from each repo to see if the cached versions of the important xml files are still valid. How else would you cache information and be sure the cached versions are in sync with the versions at the repos? You have to download something to check for sync...and repomd is pretty small...its basically an xmlized directory listing with md5sum information, take a look for yourself: /var/cache/yum/base/repomd.xml I bet you will see a difference in operation if you do yum clean headers and make sure the cached versions. You will definitely see primary.xml.gz being downloaded with === hash bars as an extra output. you can also run yum makecache to force yum to cache all the xml files from a repository's metadata and then use yum -C to run queries or get listing information. Clever people even script yum makecache to run periodically to keep the local cache synced. yum -C removes all network activity and uses only the local cache so unless you cache the packages locally as well.. you cant easily use yum -C to do installs or updates.. its very useful for check-update, list, search, and provides functionality. -jef
