I was wondering why fedora has choosen yum over apt-get

[Charles R. Anderson]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 07:41:12PM -0200, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> Unless I misunderstand, the one gotcha is the common case of a small
> changes in a large repositories requiring the entire set of (single
> file) header information to be downloaded.  This *could* become a
> bandwidth problem, not only for people in the wrong ends of small
> pipes, but also for servers, since rhn-applet would probably keep on
> fetching it over and over (at least every time it changes).

As opposed to fetching the entire directory listing to see if new
files have appeared or changed?  It is much faster to determine if a
single, known file name, has changed.