difference between yum and up2date

[Paul Howarth]

On Sun, 2005-05-22 at 19:54 +0530, Ankush Grover wrote:
> hey friends,
> 
> I have some questions regarding updating of the Fedora Core or any
> other Red hat Product.
> 
> a) What is the difference between yum and up2date? and which one is
> the best tool for updating the system.

Both do a very similar job, and it's really a matter of preference as to
which you use. I use up2date on RHEL and yum on Fedora, largely because
they're the best-supported tools in those environments. Yum is likely to
be quite a bit faster in FC4 because of the database backend it uses.

> b) If i do "yum update" .Does the yum installs the packages or it just
> download the packages and one has to install the packages/rpms
> manually?

It installs them after you give the go-ahead (which is interactively by
default, or you can use the "-y" option on the command line).

> Where does the yum stores the downloaded rpms/packages?

/var/cache/yum

> c) If I use the up2date for updating my system it download the rpms
> under /var/spool/up2date directory.One has to manually install the
> rpms downloaded by up2date if not specified while downloading "to
> install the packages" and there are some .hdr files also.One should
> delete these .hdr /rpms if the system is updated to the latest updates
> available.

Yum also caches metadata, but probably not as much.

> d) When we click on the updated rpms downloaded in the /var/spool/up2date folder
> sometimes they ask for fedora cd I know it is due to dependency
> problem.Now suppose there is no cd-rom attached to the system.But
> there is a cdrom available through nfs .One should do this or not
> 
> mount -t nfs machine_name:/mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom 
> 
> Means mounting the remote cdrom directory onto the local directory.If
> still the system asks for cd while updating the system then which is
> the best way to resolve that conflict.

Why not get up2date to install the package in the first place, which
would get it to solve the dependency problem on your behalf?

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>