yum broken; headers directory missing

Cam camilo at mesias.co.uk
Sun Mar 28 17:43:03 UTC 2004


Michael

> Well, it's not just our feelings :)  When people look through the
> archives of a mailing list and see 20 different threads with
> variations on the subject "yum is broken" or "bug in yum", etc, one
> can (understandably) get the impression that yum is buggy or prone to
> failure.  If the problems really are "somebody put the wrong url in
> their config file" then that's a different matter entirely.
> 
> I guess what I'm saying is that "broken" and "misconfigured" have very
> different connotations (to me, at least).  If this url appeared in the
> shipped yum package, then it is ABSOLUTELY a reportable bug.  I'm only
> saying that the language leads some be believe you're reporting a
> different bug (the yum executable is faulty) than you're really
> reporting (the mirror changed).

There really is a bug in the system, I'm guessing that the technology in 
yum doesn't help the developers to provide the repositories as much as 
it helps the users to download from them. I had assumed the repository 
was a-changing and a new headers file would be available soon...

For the record my yum.conf contains a line from the yum-2.0.6-1 
yum.conf.fedora:

baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/$basearch/

Which gives rise to:

[root at freebie cxm]# yum install yum
Gathering header information file(s) from server(s)
Server: Fedora Core 1.90 - Development Tree
retrygrab() failed for:
 
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/headers/header.info
   Executing failover method
failover: out of servers to try
Error getting file 
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/headers/header.info
[Errno 4] IOError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

whereas it used to work.

The only real problems I have seen in yum (as a system) have been:

* this (repository changes with no redirect. Fix: bitch about it and 
find a new headers file),

* out-of date headers fetched from a mirror but not validated against 
the main server (eg. for a while my system would fetch outdated headers 
that required openssh which was no longer available). Fix: delete 
/var/cache/yum, narrow down the mirrors to the master server and try again.

* finally, generally inefficient behaviour (downloading headers one by 
one instead of having a compressed archive of headers, excessive 
timeouts on individual downloads making yum hang for too long when the 
server stops sending, downloading stuff even if the user downloaded it 
30 sec ago and had to ctrl-C yum for some reason.

Mostly though, it just works really well :)

-Cam





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