why doesn't yum cache anything?

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:51:33 -0500, seth vidal <skvidal at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> are you using mirrorlists or are you using baseurls?

There is a rather annoying side-effect of mirrorlists -- mirrors may
not always be in sync, so quite often I issue "yum list updates" and
see that there are updates, but when I run "yum update" it hits a
different mirror, where these updates are not yet available. As a
side-effect, it has to download and parse primary.xml.gz for updates
each time the mirrors are not in sync, which depending on the
connection and processor can take a significant amount of time. I get
around it by forcing -C (cache-only mode) after initially running yum
to get the repomd.xml, but others may not know about it.

I don't have any solutions to propose, unfortunately, other than
mirroring an admittedly confusing behavior of apt, which requires
specifically issuing "apt update" to get new repository medatada.

However, especially in the cases where domain resolution takes forever
(some ISPs, in a vain attempt to combat spamming from zombie clients,
throttle down DNS responses to take 10-15 seconds), non-cache
operations with mirrorlists take quite some time more than -C.

Happy New Year,
-- 
Konstantin Ryabitsev
Zlotniks, INC