Some thoughts about yum and repositories

[William Hooper]

Gene Heskett said:
[snip]
>
> You've hit a very large part of the problem square on the head there
> William.  Because there are mirrors here and there, it seems that a
> truely inclusive mirror list, including the actual location of the machine
> one might be accessing so one can actually make an intelligent choice as
> to where to point yum at, is a very elusive, almost a state secret, thing
> to find.  Ask on the list here, and get pointed at the
> downloads.fedora.redhat machine, a machine thats never served a package up
> via yum or up2date in chunks bigger than 10k per fitfull 1 or 2 minute
> intervals.  Watching paint dry is more entertaining.

I'm not sure what post of mine you were reading...

If you want a list of Fedora core mirrors, it's pretty easy to find:

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html

I'm sure all the other repos have these lists, too.  For example:

http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraMirrorList

Physical location is not always a good metric for deciding on mirrors
anyway.  When I first got my DSL all my packets were going from here in
Ohio to Florida before going anywhere else, so picking a physically close
server to me would have been a heck of a long trip.

> The way it is, one tends to hunt around thru what may be a 30 day old
> list you've grabbed out of the FAQ or some similar location,
[snip]

Now you've hit the problem.  Too many people are convinced that there is
some magic in the yum.conf instead of actually trying to understand it.  I
cringe every time I see someone pointed to a FAQ to get a yum.conf rather
than told how to make their own changes.

The beauty of yum is that it uses standard protocols so you can easily
look at the repos with your web browser and test to your hearts content
with something like wget.

--
William Hooper