1. The GUI
pup and pirut are pretty good programs but they are in some ways, a bit restricting. (for lack of a better word). I think that they should have more then just a progress bar. They should also output more information about say, the size of the files. How much (exactly) has been downloaded, and perhaps at what speed the downloads are going.
2. yum CLI
Yum's CLI is much better than the gui tools at this point, and though it has gotten better there are some ways that it still needs to improve. The two areas I find most...upsetting involved the headers and dependency resolution. The headers are quite large....ok so maybe the biggest they get is around 400k (if I recall correctly) but when your on a slower connection, and your upgrading a lot of packages this can be quite annoying. Perhaps they header files could be placed in a different, smaller, format. Or an option to download all the header files could be included, and the headers can be updated then along with the metadata. The other, and in my opinion more important, area the yum cli should improve is in the resolution of dependencies, it should be faster. Currently yum seems just as good as apt-get or smart-pm or packman (arch linux's tool) at resolving dependecies. Yet all the other package manager do it much faster, almost instantly. I'm not sure why that is. It seems that it does each package one by one slowly. I think this may relate to the way the headers are stored. What makes these improvements to the cli so important is that if they are done they will benifit puplet and pirut, as well as anaconda's installation tool. And thus I view the ClI improvments to be very important.
Please don't misunderstand, I'm not complaining. I'm stating areas that I (based solely on what I have gathered from my usage of fedora an yum) feel that yum can improve. A friend of mine along with myself plan to start looking at the yum code to try to see what we can do to improve yum, with our basic programming skills. However I decided it would be best to work directly with the devs on this one. My goal is to start a discussion on the issue to see what the fedora devs, especially those involved directly with yum, had to say about this. And perhaps we can help in this area.
Thank you for your time.
Ahmed G.
p.s. This was the best place I could find to post this, if there is a better place to do this (a yum-devel list) please notify me and I will take this there.
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