Yum Update: Great in Theory not in Practice

[Ken Barber]

On Friday 31 December 2004 5:45 am, Eric Dunbar wrote:

> perhaps it's yum's way of downloading a 
> header for _each and every_ file rather than an index that cripples
> yum?

Yum 2.1 provides a great deal of relief in this department.  It was one of the 
first things I noticed when using Fedora Core 3.

I haven't looked into the details, so I'm probably talking out of my ass here 
-- but it appears that yum 2.1 uses gzipped archives of the headers that are 
diff'ed in some way with the header archives on the repositories.  The result 
is that instead of a bazillion little bitty headers being downloaded, one .gz 
file is downloaded instead, and ungzipped locally.

It speeds up yum considerably.

Another improvement in yum 2.1 is that if a repository hangs during download, 
you can press CTRL-C and yum will re-start the download from the next URL in 
the list of mirrors in your yum configs.

I get the impression (again, I'm talking out of my ass because I haven't 
sufficiently researched it) that changes in the repository structure are 
needed to make yum 2.1 work.  Perhaps that is in the wind for YDL.  I 
certainly hope so.

Ken