yum gripes (Was: Re: yum vs. apt)

[Steffen Kluge]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 14:27 +0000, Paul Howarth wrote:
> apt is more versatile but yum comes as standard with Fedora and is hence more 
> widely used. There's also up2date of course, which also comes as standard with 
> Fedora.

I always thought of apt as an alternative (to RPM) way of packaging and
delivering software. I have never used it myself but I understand there
is some apt-rpm middleware nowadays. I suppose Fedora apt repos use
RPMs? Anything else would be a mess.

>  It's just a matter of personal preference really.

For some reason I adopted the standard, when it changed from being
up2date to being yum. I'm not completely happy with yum, however.

First, it has the worst downloader of all tools I've tried so far - it
doesn't handle slow or shaky connections at all well and apparently
can't even resume aborted downloads! This frequently drives my nuts when
trying to update things like kernel or OOo. In those cases I have to
resort to wget to fetch the big packages. My closest mirrors are
reasonably fast (over 6Mbps download speed), but very often somewhere
50-80% into a big download they just stop sending, and no amount of
waiting is going to make the download continue. This happens with wget,
too, but wget simply times out, reconnects and resumes.

Second, yum gets its knickers in a twist every once in a while when
dependencies get too complicated. Manual rpm (without --force or
--nodeps, mind you!) is then required. This is a small gripe in
comparison, since it doesn't happen very often.

I'm considering going back to Gerald Teschl's autoupdate
(http://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~gerald/ftp/autoupdate/), which has always
worked great for me and doesn't need any particular support from the
repository. It builds and maintains a package and dependencies DB of its
own.

Alternatively, if someone could suggest a way of using external
downloaders with yum, I'd give that a try.

Cheers
Steffen.

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